If I rescued a child from drowning, the press would no doubt headline the story: 'Benn grabs child

There is no final victory, as there is no final defeat. There is just the same battle. To be fought, over and over again. So toughen up, bloody toughen up.

The way a government treats refugees is very instructive.

If we can find the money to kill people, we can find the money to help people.

I think there are two ways in which people are controlled - first of all frighten people and secondly demoralize them.

Britain today is suffering from galloping obsolescence.

The Labour party has never been a socialist party, although there have always been socialists in it - a bit like Christians in the Church of England.

We are paying a heavy political price for 20 years in which, as a party, we have played down our criticism of capitalism and soft-peddled our advocacy of socialism

The Tory party is the enemy of democracy.

I think very often the boat-rockers turn out to be the people who are building the craft

The flag of racialism which has been hoisted in Wolverhampton is beginning to look like the one that fluttered 25 years ago over Dachau and Belsen.

A man is only as common as his dreams.

Wall Street has too much wealth and political power.

Nothing reopens the springs of love so fully as absence, and no absence so thoroughly as that which must needs be endless.

If a man is not good, what has he to do with the rules of propriety? If he is not good, what has he to do with music?

It's not my fault that people are perverts.

Very few cinematographers, other than the Europeans, know how to light women like they used to in the old days.

There is no vice which mankind carries to such wild extremes as that of avarice.

The universe is not made up of atoms; it’s made up of tiny stories.

I don't know enough about daytime, I think, to say anything.

I feel there is something nice about not talking. Like you can say more by actually saying less.