Denis Healey Quotes

Squeeze property speculators until the pips squeak.

We cannot hope to achieve full employment and sustain it until we have mastered inflation.

War inside countries is all too common.

The Americans have a very active presence and policy in every single part of the world and if we broke with them, we would lose any possibility of influencing them. They would go in for global unilateralism, and the world would be a more dangerous place.

Many of us in the West have come to feel that the development of technology in the military and economic fields has produced a single world in which the central problems, both military and economic, are going to require co-operation rather than continued confrontation and competition.

Karl Marx himself preferred a glass of claret to the mug of tea affected by some of his recent converts.

I've got a happy marriage, which is the most important singular thing.

If you’re in a hole, stop digging.

Trying to create a sense of common interest does involve getting people actually to work together on common problems. It can't be created by law, that's why I disagree with the liberal approach becuase it's essentially a lawyer's approach.

Mrs Thatcher tells us she has given the French President a piece of her mind... not a gift I would receive with alacrity.

First law on holes - when you're in one, stop digging!

Unless you understand the history of a situation, you can't ever hope to solve problems.

Being attacked by him is like being savaged by a dead sheep.

World events do not occur by accident. They are made to happen, whether it is to do with national issues or commerce; and most of them are staged and managed by those who hold the purse strings.

An aircraft which is used by wealthy people on their expense accounts, whose fares are subsidized by much poorer taxpayers.

The difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison wall.

I've always criticised American policy when I've disagreed with it. Just as I've criticised British policy. I was violently anti-Suez and pro-American in 1956, just as I was violently anti-Soviet on the invasion of Hungary which took place at the same time.

It is a good thing to follow the First Law of Holes: if you are in one, stop digging.

Nothing is more dangerous that the politician who uses politics as a surrogate for an unsatisfactory personal life.

Socialism to me is establishing social control of power in society, and where that differs from liberalism for example which aims at a similar situation in some respects, is we think you can only establish control over power by changing the structure and distribution of power, notably economic power.