I could fill a page with quotes from the late, great Tony Benn. They just don't make them like that any more.
The Guardian's been putting together favourite Benn quotes, here's a couple:
Quote:
7) “Hope is the fuel of progress and fear is the prison in which you put yourself”
Tony Benn thought any meaningful change could only come from below, and felt apathy was openly encouraged by those in positions of power. “The Prime Minister said in 1911, 14 years before I was born, that if women get the vote it will undermine parliamentary democracy. How did apartheid end? How did anything happen?”
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Quote:
6) “I think there are two ways in which people are controlled. First of all frighten people and secondly, demoralise them.”
Another quote from Tony Benn’s interview with Michael Moore in Sicko, in which he highlighted poverty and healthcare inequality as a democratic issue. “The people in debt become hopeless, and the hopeless people don’t vote... an educated, healthy and confident nation is harder to govern,” he said.
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Quote:
9) “There is no moral difference between a stealth bomber and a suicide bomber. Both kill innocent people for political reasons.”
After his retirement from parliament, Benn became the public face of the Stop the War coalition. In a particularly spiky edition of BBC Question Time, his exchanges with US Republican John Bolton included this broadside:
I was born about a quarter of a mile from where we are sitting now and I was here in London during the Blitz. And every night I went down into the shelter. 500 people killed, my brother was killed, my friends were killed. And when the Charter of the UN was read to me, I was a pilot coming home in a troop ship: ‘We the peoples of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind.’ That was the pledge my generation gave to the younger generation and you tore it up. And it’s a war crime that’s been committed in Iraq, because there is no moral difference between a stealth bomber and a suicide bomber. Both kill innocent people for political reasons.
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From elsewhere:
"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?"
On equal marriage and the Church of England.