Ken Livingstone Quotes
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There isn't much about my life that's been particularly conventional.
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Well, I mean, I'm very much a pragmatic person.
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When reporters say to me I'm only doing this because it's my job... that's the same abdication of moral responsibility at the thin end of the wedge that in its most extreme and horrific version ends up with others being prepared to stand as a concentration camp guard.
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Everyone is bisexual. Almost everyone has the sexual potential for anything.
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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.
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I would like to sound like James Mason. I reckon if I'd had a better voice I could have been prime minister. It is the most irritating voice in public life.
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I was a weedy kid, not like one of those working-class men who can accommodate not being academically clever by physical strength and prowess.
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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?
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You lose power in Britain and you are just Joe Public again.
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When you see someone trying to manoeuvre it round the school gates you have to think, you are a complete idiot.
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Politics is not a healthy lifestyle.
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Some US journalist came up to me and said: 'How can you say this about President Bush?' Well, I think what I said then was quite mild. I actually think that Bush is the greatest threat to life on this planet that we've most probably ever seen. The policies he is initiating will doom us to extinction.
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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.
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The world is run by monsters and you have to deal with them. Some of them run countries, some of them run banks, some of them run news corporations.
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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.
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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.
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The press keep asking me, 'What was your biggest mistake?' But if I had made a big mistake, they'd all be writing about it, wouldn't they?
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I can only admire people who I have never met and are dead - because you know so much about anyone who is alive.
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I swim three times a week.
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The IMF and World Bank are still appalling, and now the World Trade Organisation too. All over the world people die unnecessarily because of the international financial system. Every year the international financial system kills more people than World War II. But at least Hitler was mad.
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My only regret is the media's obsession with the past.
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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.
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The civil service are risk averse.
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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.