Home › Authors › Michael Foot
Michael Foot Quotes
1913–2010 England
Michael Mackintosh Foot (23 July 1913 – 3 March 2010) was a British politician who served as Leader of the Opposition and Leader of the Labour Party from 1980 to 1983. Foot began his working life as a journalist on Tribune and the Evening Standard and co-wrote the 1940 polemic against appeasement of Hitler, Guilty Men, under a pseudonym.
England Biographers Editors Journalists Random Michael Foot quote
43 quotes
I am a Liberal, first of all, because of the unfaltering resistance which liberalism is pledged to offer to those twin dangers of fascism and war.
The members of our secret service have apparently spent so much time under the bed looking for communists that they haven't had the time to look in the bed.
If the Common Market Bill goes through, Parliament will have been deprived of some of the essential instruments for planning the nation's economy.
It does so happen to be the case that if the freedom of the people of this country—and especially the rights of trade unionists—if those precious things in the past had been left to the good sense and fairmindedness of judges, we would have precious few freedoms in this country.
He was without any rival whatever, the first comic genius who ever installed himself in Downing Street
We had not the armour, the strength, the quickness in manoeuvre, yes, the leadership
Most liberties have been won by people who broke the law
[W]e are in for fierce and angry times in this country.
The national strike of the miners in 1972 performed, I believe, a great service, not only to the miners, but the people in Britain today who wanted coal
House of Commons speech (1974)
Disraeli was my favourite Tory. He was an adventurer pure and simple, or impure and complex. I'm glad to say Gladstone got the better of him.
I think the House of Lords ought to be abolished and I don't think the best way for me to abolish it is to go there myself
You just want the Tories in, and then we will be in the Common Market for life. You, with your halo of martyrdom. I've been anti-Market longer than you.
A Britain which denounced the insanity of the nuclear strategy would be in a position to direct its influence at the United Nations and in the world at large, in a manner at present denied us
What is needed is a strong shift leftwards. This party in Parliament ought to start the process, and if it won't, the party conference will do it for them
[There are] judges who stretch the law...to suit reactionary attitudes.
In my opinion, Marxism is a great creed of human liberation. It is the creed which says that when all other empires fade and vanish, our business is to enlarge the empire of the human mind
When I was a small boy, following the affairs of the House of Commons as closely as I could, I asked my father what a Royal Commission was. He said, "It is a broody hen sitting on a china egg".
Is the Labour Party to remain a democratic party in which the right of free criticism and free debate is not merely tolerated but encouraged? Or are the rank and file of the party to be bludgeoned or cowed into an uncritical subservience towards the leadership?
I know a fascist when I see one.
[The constituency will be certain to return a socialist candidate] and this will help gain a socialist majority in the Commons and help Britain on the way to becoming a socialist republic.
Topics Michael Foot is quoted on
Works