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If one meets a powerful person--Adolf Hitler, Joe Stalin or Bill Gates--ask them five questions: What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? And how can we get rid of you?

Tony Benn

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Tony Benn
Age: 88 †
Born: 1925
Born: April 3
Died: 2014
Died: March 14
Autobiographer
Diarist
Former Member Of The European Parliament
Politician
Anthony Neil Wedgwood Benn
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Hitler
Democracy
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More quotes by Tony Benn

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Cabinet members are soon overwhelmed by the insistent demands of running their departments. On the whole, a period in high office consumers intellectual capital it does not create it....The less ministers know at the outset, the more dependent they are on the only sources of available knowledge the permanent officials.
Tony Benn
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Anyone from abroad will tell you that it is the class system that really lies at the root of our problems, economic and industrial. The House of Lords symbolises that.
Tony Benn
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Bush is actually encouraging the spread of nuclear weapons because the one thing I do know is if Iran did have nuclear weapons they wouldn't be threatening them.
Tony Benn
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I don't want to commit myself in advocating a definite republican constitution which will get bogged down with the question of who would elect the President and when.
Tony Benn
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I am on the right wing of the middle of the road and with a strong radical bias.
Tony Benn
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Food movement organic food stores supplies health food products and facilitate with instrumental support in organic agriculture.
Tony Benn
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When I think of Cool Britannia I think of old people dying of hypothermia.
Tony Benn
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I have had the advantage of a radical Christian upbringing
Tony Benn
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If you want your debt lifted you've got to sell your school and your hospitals.
Tony Benn
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There is no connection between imperialism and democracy. I mean when we ran an Empire which we did when I was born, there was no democracy anywhere.
Tony Benn
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I think there are two ways in which people are controlled - first of all frighten people and secondly demoralize them.
Tony Benn
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The New York Times said, There are two superpowers in the world: the United States and the world peace movement.
Tony Benn
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The way a government treats refugees is very instructive.
Tony Benn
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If ever I left the House of Commons it would be because I wanted to spend more time on politics.
Tony Benn
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When I saw how the European Union was developing, it was very obvious what they had in mind was not democratic. In Britain, you vote for a government so the government has to listen to you, and if you don't like it you can change it.
Tony Benn
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I'm a democrat - I don't support Bush, I don't support Blair, I don't support Bin Laden.
Tony Benn
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I'm interested in language. We used to call it the War Office. Then it became the Ministry of Defence. We used to talk about the hydrogen bomb, now we talk about a deterrent. And the language is very cleverly constructed to give the impression that it's not what it is.
Tony Benn
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It would be as unthinkable to try to construct the Labour Party without Marx as it would to be to establish university faculties of astronomy,anthropology or psychology without permitting the study of Copernicus, Darwin or Freud, and still expect such faculties to be taken seriously
Tony Benn
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Some of the jam we thought was for tomorrow, we've already eaten
Tony Benn
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I now want more time to devote to politics and more freedom to do so.
Tony Benn