Neil Kinnock Quotes

Someone up there likes me.

We live in a country afflicted by a senile and selfish capitalist system...where families are homeless, sick people unattended, children untaught whilst building workers, nurses and teachers are unemployed

Oh I detest him. I did then, I do now, and it's mutual. He hates me as well. And I'd much prefer to have his savage hatred than even the merest hint of friendship from that man.

[Margaret Thatcher is a] stubborn Salome who wants the miners' heads on a plate.

If anyone wants to know why we must conduct ourselves [with commonsense and realism], just remember at all times, with all temptations, how you, each and every one of you sitting in this hall, each and every Labour worker watching this conference, each and every Labour voter, yes, and some others as well, remember how you felt on that dreadful morning of the tenth of June. Just remember how you felt then, and think to yourselves: 'June the ninth, 1983, never ever again will we experience that.'

Heckler: At least Mrs Thatcher has got guts.
Neil Kinnock: It's a pity that other people had to leave theirs on the ground at Goose Green to prove it.

When I started to encounter Marxism at 16, the elementary truths of the surplus value theory and more than anything else, the logical argument that he produced that labour was the source of all wealth, gave me a political and intellectual justification for what I believed in a way that nothing else did.

Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Why is Glenys the first woman in her family in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Was it because our predecessors were thick? Does anybody really think that they didn't get what we had because they didn't have the talent or the strength or the endurance or the commitment? Of course not. It was because there was no platform upon which they could stand.

I'm a father. And no matter how much I try to convince myself towards the course of 'enlightenment' I know damn well that, put to the test, I'm what people would call a reactionary. I know it. I try and rationalize it but it's no good. I come to the same conclusion all the time. My children stand a chance of being hurt in the forseeable future by what's called permissiveness.

Those who have the immense dishonesty to fight with a ballot box in one hand and a rifle in the other have no place in democratic politics.

[Labour has] always believed that the community as a whole should have a greater control over these “commanding heights of the economy”.

We must not look for some kind of Messiah.

The roots of defeat which were put down by some of the elements of our party in the two or three years after 1980 made victory difficult to achieve.

By emphatically pressing the view that it is only possible to support radical Labour policies by supporting Tony Benn, Tony's associates have turned the contest into a gamble with policies, [yet any] disagreement with those claims has been slandered as 'opportunism', 'careerism' and evidence of every kind of departure from socialist conviction and purpose. That is the truly dangerous product of these months of contest.

We support the efforts to keep the pits open until exhausted.