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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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The function of parliamentary democracy, under universal franchise, historically considered, is to expose wealth-privilege to the attack of the people. It is a sword pointed at the heart of property-power. The arena where the issues are joined is Parliament.
In Place of Fear (1952)
In 1945 and 1946 we were attacked on our housing policy by every spiv in the country—for what is Toryism except organised spivery? They wanted to let the spivs loose.
I do not take the view that Great Britain is a second-class Power. On the contrary, I take the view that this country is a depository of probably more concentrated experience and skill than any other country in the world.
I do not represent the big bosses at the top; I represent the people at the bottom, the individual men and women, and I say that this Regulation is the enfranchisment of the corporate society and the disfranchisment of the individual.
Why should we, who are clearing up the muddle, allow ourselves to be scared by headlines in the capitalist Press? It is the most prostituted Press in the world, most of it owned by a gang of millionaires.
The social furniture of modern society is so complicated and fragile that it cannot support the jackboot. We cannot run the processes of modern society by attempting to impose our will upon nations by armed force. If we have not learned that we have learned nothing.
Although I am not myself a devotee of bigness for bigness sake, I would rather be kept alive in the efficient if cold altruism of a large hospital than expire in a gush of warm sympathy in a small one.
No serious student who studies the history of the last half century can deny the ferment of ideas associated with the names of Marx, Engels and Lenin. Their effectiveness in arming the minds of working-class leaders all over the world with intellectual weapons showed that their teaching had an organic relationship with the political and social realities of their time.
In Place of Fear (1952)
Our main case is and must remain that in a modern complex society it is impossible to get rational order by leaving things to private economic adventure. Therefore I am a Socialist. I believe in public ownership.
He is a man suffering from petrified adolescence....He is an extrovert, a picture thinker. He has intelligence but no intellect....He really has the values of a boy of seventeen to eighteen but he makes them sound like mature judgments by his sophisticated speech.
The collective psychology of the Moslem states is definitely repulsive to me. It is so morbid and wildly irrational that I am conscious of an abiding sense of unease when I am in one of them.
Gaitskell wants to make capitalism work better – but with controls. That’s what makes him so dangerous. He wants capitalism to go on existing – but without the prizes which capitalism earns for itself. Of course this is impossible. It cannot work.
I may be ready to be polite 20 years from now, when we are able to look back on 25 years of Socialist government. Then maybe I won't have enough energy to be rude. But while we have the energy to be rude let us be rude to the right people.
I deplore the letter today in The Times from a distinguished orthopaedist, who talked about private practice as though it should be the glory of the profession. What should be the glory of the profession is that a doctor should be able to meet his patients with no financial anxiety.
I have never been able to reconcile the obscene conduct of the Russian Communists under Stalin—the assassinations, tortures, imprisonments and the impounding of helpless people in camps—with their philosophy, and I have never understood how the Russians could do so. The only explanation is that it is not part of their Communism at all, but of Byzantinism.
Now that we are engaged once more in policy-making it is essential that we should keep clear before us that one of the central principles of Socialism is the substitution of public for private ownership. There is no way round this.
A very large part of the population of Wales was English-speaking, and the English-speaking part had a contribution just as big, if not bigger, to make towards Welsh cultural life than the Welsh-speaking part. A great deal of the literature of which Welshmen were proud and a great deal of the poetry for which this generation would be noted had been written in English by Welshmen.
The conversion of an industry to public ownership is only the first step towards Socialism. It is an all-important step, for without it the conditions of further progress are not established. One important consequence is a shift of power that resolves the conflict between public and private claims. The danger of the State machine being manipulated by private vested interests is thus reduced.
In Place of Fear (1952)
The NHS will last as long as there are folk left with the faith to fight for it.
Misattributed
I stuffed their mouths with gold.
Attributed
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