Ken Livingstone Quotes

I'd love to write about my growing sexual awareness, but the press would turn it into something squalid.

When you see someone trying to manoeuvre it round the school gates, you have to think, 'You are a complete idiot.'

I can easily lose myself emotionally in absolute Hollywood garbage.

Boris [Johnson] and Dave [Cameron] gnawed each other's testicles [during the Tory civil war which blighted the EU referendum].

I've always been a workaholic. I reckon, on average, I've had less than one day a year off in my working career.

I have only ever borrowed money for investment. I have been sound money all my life.

I never came into life with any favours or privileges.

I'm more interested in politicians who deal with human rights in their own country rather than lecture the rest of the world.

What defines someone's music taste is their teens and early 20s. It's that combination of your sexual awakening and the music of the time, it fixes you forever.

The British judiciary is one of the most corrupt in the world because of politically active judges.

I can only admire people who I have never met and are dead - because you know so much about anyone who is alive.

I take a much more pragmatic view than many people on the Left about working with Neil Kinnock. Kinnock represents the best vehicle possible for achieving socialism now.

We look to the left and to the right And we need help but nobody's in sight Where is the man that we all need Tell him he's to come and rescue me.

The people I really most admire are Robert Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt. If you know someone, it is very hard to revere them.

I've got people handling the media. I employ at the moment two people. No-one is paying income tax on the money they use to employ people.

I grew up in Lambeth, I went to normal schools and I've grown up in a city where people say what they think.

I don't work hard enough. If I had worked harder I might have been prime minister.

The truth is, no one pays more tax than they have to.

I spent the 1960s and 1970s seeking myself - the working-class tradition of self-education.

I swim three times a week.

I think I have gone through my entire public career never telling a lie. I have made mistakes but I never knowingly lied.

I think it's much more important to keep people in work than have pay rises.

I've never declined to do an interview.

Yes, there are lots of individual exceptions. But no one has ever done a study about voting intention without ascertaining that the biggest determining factor is your income and your wealth.

When I was leader of the GLC, by the time I had been in control for three years, the difference in pay between the cleaner and the director general was a four-to-one ratio. I find that attractive.

If you are running a city you must focus on day-to-day problems.

If women had never been given the right to vote, then Labour would have won every election after the war.

I refuse not to have a sense of humour.

I'm never going to take the view that I should say whatever I need to say in order to achieve something. Because that implies a level of dishonesty.

Every budget I have ever prepared has been balanced.

Everyone changes all the time.

Give me the whole world to run and then I'll be happy. If tomorrow I was told I had to sort out the whole world's problems I'd sleep like a baby.

What do we do about climate change bearing down upon us?

Most kids don't get to go their parents' wedding.

I do the gardening.

I do explicitly see Jewish people as a people - not either a religion or an ethnicity but a people.