I don’t think people realise how the establishment became established. It simply stole the land and property off the poor, surrounded themselves with weak minded sycophants for protection, gave themselves titles and have been wielding power ever since.

— Tony Benn

Tony Benn Quotes

If you file your waste-paper basket for fifty years, you have a public library.

— Tony Benn

I did not enter the Labour Party 47 years ago to have our manifesto written by Dr Mori, Dr Gallup and Mr Harris.

— Tony Benn

Although socialism is widely held by the establishment to be outdated, the things that are most popular in British society today are little pockets of socialism, where areas of life have been excluded from the crude operation of market forces and are protected for the benefit of the community.

— Tony Benn

We are not just here to manage capitalism but to change society and to define its finer values.

— Tony Benn

I’ve made every mistake – but mistakes are how you learn.

— Tony Benn

The thought that my mother would suddenly be a foreigner would upset me very much.

— Tony Benn

Choice depends on the freedom to choose and if you are shackled with debt you don’t have the freedom to choose.

— Tony Benn

When you think of the number of men in the world who hate each other, why, when two men love each other, does the church split?

— Tony Benn

Democracy is not just voting every 5 years and watching ‘Big Brother’ in between and wondering why nothing happens. Democracy is what we do and say where we live and work.

— Tony Benn

The people who have sacrificed their view in order to get to the top have very often left no footprints in the sands of time.

— Tony Benn

The Civil Service is a bit like a rusty weathercock. It moves with opinion then it stays where it is until another wind moves it in a different direction.

— Tony Benn

Encouragement is the most important thing in the world for young people, rather than league tables, which demoralise everyone.

— Tony Benn

There is good and bad in all of us and the Church uses the idea of original sin to control us by saying that, if we do not obey the bishops, we will rot in Hell.

— Tony Benn

Of course, Mao made his mistakes, because everybody does, but at least he allowed working people to smoke, even in the most trying circumstances, such as when, for one reason or another, they found themselves up before the firing squad.

— Tony Benn

I don’t make mistakes. I make predictions which immediately turn out to be wrong.

— Tony Benn

By the end of his sixteen-course meal in Buckingham Palace, Ramsay McDonald discovered he had changed his mind about the workers owning the means of production. From now on, he felt it better that the Dukes and Duchesses should continue to own the means of production. The workers would just have to make do with what was left over.

— Tony Benn

I was stunned with outrage.

— Tony Benn

The Prime Minister keeps me on around here because I make him look good.

— Tony Benn

Clement Attlee, who looked like a sadistic sanitary inspector...

— Tony Benn

I don’t think people realise how the establishment became established. It simply stole the land and property off the poor, surrounded themselves with weak minded sycophants for protection, gave themselves titles and have been wielding power ever since.

— Tony Benn
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