Tony Benn Quotes

Jesus was not a Christian, nor was Marx a Marxist.

… that veiled sister of communism – legalistic socialism

No true Latter-day Saint and no true American can be a socialist or a communist or support programs leading in that direction. These evil philosophies are incompatible with Mormonism, the true gospel of Jesus Christ.

One of the most destructive anti-concepts in the history of moral philosophy is the term 'duty.

I can't understand Karl Marx, so how can I be a Communist?

I never think in terms of alienation; it's the others who do. Alienation means one thing to Hegel, another to Marx and yet another to Freud; so it is not possible to give a single definition, one that will exhaust the subject. It is a question bordering on philosophy, and I'm not a philosopher nor a sociologist. My business is to tell stories, to narrate with images - nothing else. If I do make films about alienation - to use that word that is so ambiguous - they are about characters, not about me.

[Marx's theories] gave me a political and intellectual justification for what I believed in a way that nothing else did.

All I know is that I am not a Marxist.

To keep the middle coming back, you can't say some radically conservative or radically progressive things. That's been the bane of organized religion. It makes me wonder if Jesus' first definition of the church as "two or three gathered in my name" is not still the best way.

I have no expectation that any man will read history aright who thinks that what was done in a remote age, by men whose names have resounded far, has any deeper sense than what he is doing today.

Whether or not you believe in Fate comes down to one thing: who do you blame when something goes wrong.

Philosophy is, in the last instance, class struggle in the field of theory.

Wrong hath but wrong, and blame the due of blame.

I remain instinctively hostile to communitarian philosophy and communitarian politics.

I am not sure just what Marx had in mind when he wrote that "philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it." Did he mean that philosophy could change the world, or that philosophers should turn to the higher priority of changing the world? If the former, then he presumably meant philosophy in a broad sense of the term, including analysis of the social order and ideas about why it should be changed, and how. In that broad sense, philosophy can play a role, indeed an essential role, in changing the world.

We turn to Marx, therefore, not because he is infallible, but because he is inescapable.

Knowledge is power. Power to do evil...or power to do good. Power itself is not evil. So knowledge itself is not evil.

The two principles referred to are Authority and Liberty, and the names of the two schools of Socialistic thought which fully and unreservedly represent one or the other of them are, respectively, State Socialism and Anarchism. Whoso knows what these two schools want and how they propose to get it understands the Socialistic movement. For, just as it has been said that there is no half-way house between Rome and Reason, so it may be said that there is no half-way house between State Socialism and Anarchism.

A socialist is someone who has read Lenin and Marx. An anti-socialist is someone who understands Lenin and Marx.

Anyone who can look me in the eye and say they prefer the story of Moses or Jesus or Mohammed to the life of Socrates is intellectually defective.

The trouble is that once you see it, you can't unsee it. And once you've seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There's no innocence. Either way, you're accountable.

I am constantly concerned about being quoted in the press and perhaps saying the wrong thing or having what I say misinterpreted and bringing reproach to the name of Christ. People do not come to hear what Billy Graham has to say; they want to hear what God has to say. Jesus tells us not to be misled by the voices of strangers. There are so many strange voices being heard in the religious world of our day. We must compare what they say with the Word of God.

Responsibility is the price every man must pay for freedom.

[He] saw communism for the sham that it was--a bunch of brutes who seized power in the name of the people, only to repress the very people they claimed to champion.

Be careful of those who kill in Jesus' name; he don't believe in killing at all.