Michael Foot Quotes (1913-2010)

“Democratic socialism traces its origin to a moral revolt against the inhuman dictatorship which nineteenth century capitalism imposed upon our people, and it has rejected with no less vigour in this century another form of inhuman dictatorship into which Marxism was tragically distorted.”

“I first joined the Labour party in Liverpool because of what I saw of the poverty, the unemployment, and the endless infamies committed on the inhabitants of the back-streets of that city. I am horrified that the threat of unemployment and economic misery is now being deployed against the same kind of people once again.”

““Think of it, a free Italy: it is the poetry of politics”, wrote Byron at a dark moment in the history of the Italian Risorgimento. Think of it, a free, democratic Socialist Spain – there is surely still some poetry in that kind of politics today, even if it is beyond the imagination of such stunted, pusillanimous souls as Bernard Levin.”

“Of all the sights and sounds which attracted me on my first arrival to live in London in the mid-thirties, one combined operation left a lingering, individual spell. I naturally went to Hyde Park to hear the orators, the best of the many free entertainments on offer in the capital. I heard the purest milk of the world flowing, then as now, from the platform of the Socialist Party of Great Britain.”

“Spain cut the knot of emotional and intellectual contradictions in which the Left had been tangled ever since Hitler came to power. Suddenly the claims of international law, class solidarity and the desire to win the Soviet Union as an ally fitted into the same strategy. These subconscious releases no doubt played their part in swelling the mood of sympathy for the Spanish Republic which swept so swiftly through the British working class. But no complicated explanations are required. The spectacle itself was stirring enough.”

“The rights and the circumstances of the people in the Falkland Islands must be uppermost in our minds. There is no question in the Falkland Islands of any colonial dependence or anything of the sort. It is a question of people who wish to be associated with this country and who have built their whole lives on the basis of association with this country. We have a moral duty, a political duty and every other kind of duty to ensure that that is sustained. The people of the Falkland Islands have the absolute right to look to us at this moment of their desperate plight, just as they have looked to us over the past 150 years. They are faced with an act of naked, unqualified aggression, carried out in the most shameful and disreputable circumstances. Any guarantee from this invading force is utterly worthless—as worthless as any of the guarantees that are given by this same Argentine junta to its own people.”

“MacDonald's temperament was temporising, calculating, cautious, gradualist to the fingertips... He had enormous resources of diligence and patience and endurance. These qualities together made him the expert negotiator and party manager which he undoubtedly was... [H]e also had great spasmodic gleams of imagination which enabled him to sweep aside the suffocating orthodoxies of the time.”

“As a man of words and a man of action combined, no other figure of this century could match the way he would take all national frontiers in his stride. He was the first who could properly call himself a citizen of the world, and who sought to translate his claim into action. Amazingly, some of his supposedly less well-educated contemporaries saw all this quite clearly when it was concealed from their terrified rulers. Soon after the publication of The Rights of Man in 1791 one of his Yorkshire disciples wrote: ‘Our views of The Rights of Man are not confined solely to this small island but are extended to the whole human race, black or white, high or low.’ That was the true Paineite doctrine; it was no accident that the American Paine was one of the first to denounce slavery and the English Paine one of the first to describe the lineaments of the welfare state.”

“William Cobbett, a man of genius in the use of his pen but gifted too in his knowledge of the new phenomenon of popular politics.”

“[I]f John Smith had lived I think it would have been a very great advantage for the party. I think he had a better understanding of the Labour movement than others do.”

“She was a wonderful fighter for socialism from her early days to the last. She gave her whole being to the Labour movement. Her last fight was for the pensioners and she helped to change that too.”

“No rising star in the political firmament ever shone more brightly than Oswald Mosley, none promised more surely to soar to the heavens – and none fell to earth with so deadening a thud. Never were such rich talents so wretchedly squandered. Never did success turn to failure so inscrutably.”

“He was always ready to pose the truly awkward dilemmas, and time and again he swam against the stream. ... Few figures in history can match his persistent intellectual courage. ... He became one of the chief glories of our nation and our people and I defy anyone who loves the English language and the English heritage to think of him without a glow of patriotism.”

“What a theme, and what a speech, and what a speaker, and how Oliver Cromwell himself would have been thrilled to hear the parliamentary cause elevated to its rightful pre-eminence... Writing as an impenitent Leveller who still begs to differ with you (and Oliver Cromwell) in so many matters, I still cannot withhold my wonder and excitement at what I heard there today.”

“He had a clear idea of the objectives he wanted to secure, and mostly, from a socialist point of view, they were good ones. He would listen; he could be endlessly patient in negotiations, which is the only way to negotiate with would-be friends or allies; he had an irrepressible intellectual curiosity deriving partly from his interest in matters which touched only the fringe of politics.”

“Indira Gandhi was the least egotistical great statesman I ever met. She hardly ever talked about herself; she could reduce all personal questions to a proper perspective. She was much more interested in the great political questions: the way the world was going, how the unity of her beloved India could be preserved, how the poverty of her people could be broken, how nuclear annihilation could be averted.”

“He was, I believe, the most principled great political leader of the century in the sense that to sustain and apply his principles in practice was the motive power of his life, the passion that absorbed him while others were engaged in the darker corners of the political workshop. … Aneurin Bevan, I believe, did more than any other man of his time to keep alive democratic socialism as the most adventurous, ambitious, intelligent, civilised and truly liberal of modern doctrines. This, the triumph of his whole life and personality, was the greatest of his achievements.”

“Tawney's Socialism...derived from a Christian inspiration. Tawney's Socialism, thanks no doubt to his memories of the First World War, comprised a full-blooded defence of the way Britain must be physically defended... Tawney's Socialism was also inextricably soldered with his democratic faith; the two together so that no one could ever put them asunder. Tawney's Socialism could not be traced solely to William Morris...but Morris's ideas and idealism were woven into the rich pattern of his political faith... His writings were read and loved – it is not too much to say – by one generation of Socialists after another.”

“He once called himself the Muggletonian Marxist, and the title is too tempting to resist. He claimed some special affinity with one associate of the sect, William Blake, and all those who ever heard him lecture on the subject must at least draw some comfort from the fact that he completed this volume before his death. Almost every page offers fresh evidence, not merely of his vast, overflowing erudition, but of his wit, his humanity, his soaring historical imagination, the combination of qualities which made the publication of The Making of the English Working Class such an event not merely in the writing of English history but in the politics of our century.”

“Charles Fox...[had] the combination of gifts which made him the most attractive Englishman who ever gave his mind to parliamentary politics. Somehow the influence which persuaded Edward Gibbon to say, “Let him do what he will; I must love the dog,” has been transmitted down to us, and somehow, too, the cause of English liberty which he made peculiarly his own embodies the glow of his personality... Fox himself felt the democratic potency of those contests and gave emphasis to it in his own words: “It is the energy, the boldness of a man's mind, which prompts him to speak, not in private but in large and popular assemblies, that constitutes, that creates in a state, the spirit of freedom.” He drew strength and courage from the vast London crowds who swayed before him, and it was there he learned his hatred of censorship, repression, informers; his trust in the people.”

“His vitality, his brainpower, his endurance, his wit, his eloquence, his industry, his application were superabundant, superhuman. The first and last impression left by the Colosseum concerns its size. So with Churchill: the man was huge. Then, also, for the bulk of the British adult population, the moment which must stand out most proudly in their collective memory was 1940. More deliberately than at any other time in its history the nation united in a good cause... That was their finest hour. Churchill was the prime organiser, the voice, the symbol and the historian of those great days... His precise virtue then was that he represented his countrymen in that crisis better than at any other moment in his career. He exemplified, in word and deed – more, in every inflection and gesture – the untiring, resplendent courage which the hour demanded... Rarely were the needs of a nation and the chief quality of its leader better matched than in 1940. Nothing can ever take that from him. No one in his senses will ever try.”

“Foot has not built a wall of words so much as a battering ram. It is a lexicon of positive politics; an overtly partisan rhetoric that has been forged from an intimate acquaintance with three centuries of radical writing. ... It is based on a belief of our shared humanity across races, peoples and to a lesser extent classes. At the heart of Foot's political credo is the articulation of a burning desire for equality of outcome. But perhaps even more pressing is the unrelenting demand for a peace that means more than simply an absence of war: a peace based on justice and international accountability. ... Much of the writing in this collection is as much about literature for its own sake as about politics; as much about love as Labour; as much about passion as power. Indeed, Foot the great humanist has a credo based on a trinity: politics, poetry and passion.”

“Michael Foot was a genuine British radical - one who possessed a powerful sense of community, a pride in our progressive past and faith in our country's potential for a radical future.”

“I was caught on the hop in one of my interviews last week with the question: “Of all the people you have served with, who would you like to serve with again?” ... My reply was instinctive. Believe it or not, I said “Michael Foot”.”

“[After Argentina's invasion of the Falklands] Michael Foot – popularly seen as a sentimental old pacifist – was demanding a military response to wipe away the stain of national humiliation... In fact Foot was not a pacifist at all. As an ardent young journalist he had been one of the authors of Guilty Men, the famous indictment of the Chamberlain Government's unreadiness for war in 1939, and he still harked back to 1940 as emotionally as any Churchillian. In his very different way he expressed the national mood of outraged patriotism as authentically as Mrs Thatcher herself.”

“We remember Michael and celebrate his life not just as the life of an intelligent and principled politician but as a great British Humanist. A good life for all is a humanist aspiration, and Michael was one humanist who worked hard to make that a reality for every man and woman. His steadfast dedication to humanist and progressive ideals of freedom, peace, social justice was pursued in a life of both thought and action – another humanist ideal.”

“Arriving for a recent away game at Selhurst Park, a steward asked the ninetysomething Foot whether he was carrying an offensive weapon, whereupon he produced a battered copy of Milton's selected poems, explaining that Milton's poetry represented one of the most potent weapons in English history.”

“Michael Foot has been a great parliamentarian – perhaps the best I witnessed during my 33 years in the House of Commons. He had a particular talent for the spontaneous epigram. Jim Callaghan, he said, “does everything on purpose”. He loved the business of Parliament and believed in the Commons as a bastion of democracy. He would have been most at home in the Victorian Westminster when literature and learning were an essential requirement of success.”

“The fact is that if Michael had gone well before the [1983] election, we might have won. We had no chance whatever so long as he was Leader.”

“Michael Foot, who has died aged 96, was a supreme parliamentary democrat who used his great gifts as an inspiring speaker and writer to urge peace, security, prosperity and opportunity for humanity and punishment for bigots and bullies of every kind. His bravery and generosity were unsurpassed. He used both to ensure that the Labour party survived as a political force when self-indulgent factionalism could have doomed it to irrelevance.”

“Foot's ultimate task, as orator, pamphleteer, and communicator extraordinary, has been to educate, and to relate the British variant of socialism to a long, but still relevant, history of British libertarian protest—in other words, to the real world. In his respect for parliament, for the rule of law (subject to some very valid doubts about the judgement of judges), for representative democracy, for the pluralism and tolerance embedded in the culture of his people, he has been in the best sense a force for stability. … He has re-articulated and vindicated a long, creative legacy of protest which in the 1970s seemed close to being corrupted or destroyed.”

“I revealed how, when in Government, Michael Foot never once sat with the four senior Ministers who made the decisions on nuclear policy. It reflected my very strong view that a man who had deliberately avoided sharing responsibility before was not fit to take the sole responsibility now. Under Michael Foot, Labour would not have been fit to govern.”