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Aneurin Bevan Quotes
1897–1960 Wales
Aneurin Bevan (15 November 1897 – 6 July 1960) was a Welsh Labour Party politician who is best known for overseeing the creation of the National Health Service in the Labour government after World War II. Bevan, a left-winger, was intermittently in trouble with the Labour leadership; in the 1950s he astonished his supporters by opposing unilateral nuclear disarmament.
Also known as: Bevan, Aneurin, Nye Bevan
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60 quotes
We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run down.
This island is made mainly of coal and surrounded by fish. Only an organizing genius could produce a shortage of coal and fish at the same time.
Damn it all, you can't have the crown of thorns and the thirty pieces of silver.
On his position in the Labour Party (1956)
The language of priorities is the religion of socialism.
What argument have they to persuade the young men to fight except merely in another squalid attempt to defend themselves against a redistribution of the international swag?
I read the newspapers avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.
How can wealth persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power? Here lies the whole art of Conservative politics in the twentieth century.
In Place of Fear (1952)
We could manage to survive without money changers and stockbrokers. We should find it harder to do without miners, steel workers and those who cultivate the land.
In Place of Fear (1952)
The British constitution, with its adult suffrage, exposes all rights and privileges, properties and powers, to the popular will. The only checks are those that arise from a sense of justice and social propriety.
In Place of Fear (1952)
The Labour Party should oppose the Government arms plan root and branch.
The day of imperial power is over. We are ashamed of our imperial past in Great Britain, and you have a lot to be ashamed of, too.
Nasser's a thug. He needs to be taught a lesson.
The Prime Minister must realise that in this country there is a taunt, on everyone's lips, that if Rommel had been in the British Army, he would still have been a sergeant.
The issue therefore in a capitalist democracy resolves itself into this: either poverty will use democracy to win the struggle against property, or property, in fear of poverty, will destroy democracy.
In Place of Fear (1952)
If the Labour Party is not going to be a Socialist Party, I don't want to lead it.
By refusing the state effective intervention in the economic activities of society, the Tory is a potential Fascist element in the community. By denying Parliament a vigorous economic life he condemns it to death.
Why Not Trust the Tories? (1944)
Society becomes more wholesome, more serene, and spiritually healthier, if it knows that its citizens have at the back of their consciousness the knowledge that not only themselves, but all their fellows, have access, when ill, to the best that medical care can provide.
Bevan described the proposal for a free trade market for Europe as a "will-of-the-wisp" which they were expected to spend their time following in Westminster. The whole idea was purely a nineteenth-century conception.
That so many people suffer from preventable privation, whilst others enjoy privileges and material advantages that do not on any reasonable reckoning flow from personal accomplishments, is evidence of dangerous social instability.
In Place of Fear (1952)
This so-called affluent society is an ugly society still. It is a vulgar society. It is a meretricious society. It is a society in which priorities have gone all wrong.
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