Neil Kinnock

I warn you not to be ordinary, I warn you not to be young, I warn you not to fall ill, and I warn you not to grow old.

Is Tony Blair of the Labour party? The answer to that is profoundly 'yes', but that is not how, sentimentally, he is regarded in the Labour movement generally.

Margaret Thatcher was not a malicious person. She was a person who couldn't see, or didn't want to see, the unfairness and disadvantaging consequences of the application of what she thought to be a renewing ideology.

I take notice of those who have argued consistently for the modernisation of the E.U., but so many of the skeptics in Britain are just hostile to the whole European idea.

Do something that makes a difference - because, by God, there's a lot to make you angry.

Newspapers are tutors as well as informers.

The enemy of idealism is zealotry.

I'd like to be remembered as somebody who tried to promote justice.

People who are in politics to be right all the time would be better off taking up fly-fishing. It's less dangerous. Politics that is not applied in the real world and doesn't address the real challenges and paradoxes and agonies is a hobby.

In the U.K. the far Right is a stain on society and there is a cultural resistance to it.

The Parthenon without the marbles is like a smile with a tooth missing.

I would die for my country but I could never let my country die for me.

My first real experience of ambition was as party leader. It was my ambition for Labour to win, in which event I would be prime minister.

There are politicians who seethe with ambition all the time, and there are a lot of other politicians who don't. I'm in the second category, that's all.

The unforgivable political sin is vanity; the killer diet is sour grapes.

People, even independently minded people, do to an extent draw their impressions from what they are told, especially if they are told it incessantly by newspapers.

Loyalty is a fine quality, but in excess it fills political graveyards.

They travel best in gangs hanging around like clumps of bananas thick skinned and yellow.

I'm the guy everybody wanted to live next door. They just didn't want me to be prime minister.

No prime minister in Britain will ever be able to go to war without the endorsement of a majority of the House of Commons.

If we are going to have a bicameral parliament, I think there should always be a reserved place for people whose background and experience are critical to the welfare of the nation.

You cannot fashion a wit out of two half-wits.

I didn't call for a ballot at the start of the miners' strike in 1984. I'll regret that until my dying day.

The enemy of idealism is zealotry.