183 Quotes by Tony Benn

[I am against] the Treaty of Rome which entrenches laissez faire as its philosophy and chooses bureaucracy as its administrative method.

Workers are not going to be fobbed off with a few shares...or by a carbon copy of the German system of co-determination.

Britain is the only colony in the British Empire and it is up to us now to liberate ourselves.

I sometimes wish the trade unionists who work in the mass media, those who are writers and broadcasters and secretaries and printers and lift operators of Thomson House would remember that they too are members of our working class movement and have a responsibility to see that what is said about us is true.

The 1973 Labour Conference will have before it the most radical programme the Party has prepared since 1945.

When we have a majority we will do it. I think the days of the Lords are quite genuinely numbered.

Anyone from abroad will tell you that it is the class system that really lies at the root of our problems, economic and industrial. The House of Lords symbolises that.

I opposed the Suez war, I opposed the Falklands war. I opposed the Libyan bombing and I opposed the Gulf war and I never believed that any of those principled arguments lost a single vote - indeed, I think they gained support though that was not why you did it. What has been lacking in Labour politics over a long period is a principled stand

Cabinet members are soon overwhelmed by the insistent demands of running their departments. On the whole, a period in high office consumers intellectual capital; it does not create it....The less ministers know at the outset, the more dependent they are on the only sources of available knowledge; the permanent officials.