Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
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 American agenda is sweeping everything before it, and although it's not perfect, the EU is better on environmental issues. It's a less rapacious form of capitalism.
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.
There is now a desperate need for a London-wide left caucus of those interested in the GLC and local councils so that we can compare and discuss what is happening in each borough.
Racism serves as the cutting edge of the most reactionary movements. An ideology that starts by declaring one human being inferior to another is the slope whose end is at Auschwitz.
I came into politics because I wished to change things. You can't do that by lying to people; you have to educate, and persuade, and carry them with you - and it's often a long haul.
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.
I employed my wife for three years to sit in the attic and type up my autobiography, 700 pages, organise everywhere I go. I'm paying the normal rate of tax on the money I take out for myself.
I could not cherish London and not value Jewish London. The contribution of Jews to London is immense - politically, economically, culturally, intellectually, philanthropically, artistically.
I feel a degree of regret that Marshall did not push on and say 'abolish the GLC' because I think it would have been a major saving and would have released massive resources for productive use.
If I was courting the Muslim vote, I wouldn't have put establishing the partnership ceremony at the forefront of my first term, would I? I go all around London advocating lesbian and gay rights.
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.
It would actually be quite nice if the American ambassador in Britain could pay the [congestion] charge that everybody else is paying and not actually try and skive out of it like some chiselling little crook.
I mean I get loads of money, all from different sources. You give it to your accountant. They manage it. But you pay corporation tax. If you're then taking it out and spending it on yourself, you have to pay more.
My view is rather than just rage at your impotence you find the best way of achieving as much as you can within whatever constraints there are. It's not the world I would have created but you do what you can within it.
I Kenneth Robert Livingstone, having been elected to the office of mayor of London, declare that I take that office upon myself, and will duly and faithfully fulfil the duties of it to the best of my judgement and ability.
I undertake that, in the exercise of my functions of that office I will have regard to any guidance with respect to ethical standards issued by the secretary of state under Section 66 of the Greater London Authority Act 1999.
Working with the Jewish community is essential to me and what I stand for. I do explicitly see Jewish people as a people - not either a religion or an ethnicity but a people. The Tories take Jewish London for granted. I will not.
To avoid manufactured misunderstandings, the policies of Israeli governments are not analogous to Nazism. They do not aim at the systematic extermination of the Palestinian people, in the way Nazism sought the annihilation of the Jews.
I actually think the civil service, who are the malignancy at the heart of public life, have consciously prevented, talked ministers out of, made it difficult regulatory-wise, to allow more pressure on alternative energy sources to grow.
When you get into politics, you find that all your worst nightmares about it turn out to be true, and the people who are attracted to large concentrations of power are precisely the ones who should be kept as far away from it as possible.
All the politics of the post-war period was about the clash between the Soviet Union and America, and virtually all issues ended up being subordinated to that. Now, the question is, what is the most a socialist can achieve in a global economy?
The market is a brilliant system for the exchange of goods and services, but it doesn't protect the environment unless it's regulated, it doesn't train your workforce unless it's regulated, and it doesn't give you the long-term investment you want.
Well, on lots of small things we could have done better, but on all the big things we called it right. You should make less mistakes as you get older, and I became a councillor back in 1971, so if by this stage in politics I'm making lots of big mistakes, then I shouldn't be here.
I think George Bush is the most corrupt American president since Harding in the Twenties. He is not the legitimate president. This really is a completely unsupportable government and I look forward to it being overthrown as much as I looked forward to Saddam Hussein being overthrown.
I can't understand why anyone would want to live the life of a politician if you can't say pretty much what you think. You are not in it for the money: there's unremitting pressure on your life, you give up so much of your privacy. It can only be because of the things you want to do and the things you want to say.
Today the Israeli government continues seizures of Palestinian land for settlements, military incursions into surrounding countries and denial of the right of Palestinians expelled by terror to return. Ariel Sharon, Israel's prime minister, is a war criminal who should be in prison, not in office. Israel's own Kahan commission found that Sharon shared responsibility for the Sabra and Shatila massacres.
The Tories had the legal right to demand extra meetings of the council but I could decide when they would be held and always called them for Friday afternoons, knowing that three or four of the richer Tories went to the country early and were not prepared to stay in the city beyond lunchtime. I realised that nothing in politics is new when I read in Suetonius's The Twelve Caesars that Julius Caesar pulled the same trick when reactionaries in the senate were making his life difficult.