Ken Livingstone Quotes

You know, London is so sprawling, and you can sometimes forget that anybody else is on a stage anywhere else.

You become so encapsulated in this world of being a star. People listen to what you say, you have this voice, it becomes unreal and you become far removed from the people you came from.

Politicians are wonderful people as long as they stay away from things they don't understand, such as working for a living.

The Shield has been up at the top for so long now, they're just living in their own little world. They're not working for the boys; they're working for each other.

Politicians are at a great distance from the academic world. Barack Obama was my colleague at Chicago - but could i ever talk to him now? Never.

I think he lives in such a rarified bubble these days, he doesn't understand what reality is any more.

I understand politicos gotta make bank. But cloistering with the Hollywood elite is not how you prove you're a man of the people.

I went to boarding school, and then I went to Oxford, and I know how easy it is for certain groups of people to become wholly insulated from ordinary life.

It's one of my biggest internal struggles - the whole schooling system in London and the fact that my kids are going to a posh school. It freaks me out.

I do wait in line, and I do take the subway, and I do my own grocery shopping, and I do take the kids to school. But it almost doesn't matter to a certain segment of the populace.

People question what I thought of Oxford. Students used to talk about the 'Oxford bubble' because the place can make you feel cut off from the rest of the world. I would forget there were places like London that were not centred round libraries and essays.

In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us.

People in power tend to get tone deaf.

Most of us pay some sort of price for screwing up. Quayle never has. His high school guidance counselor told him his grades were too low for admission to DePauw University, where his grandfather was a trustee and major donor, but he got in anyway. In college he flunked the departmental exam that was supposed to be a prerequisite to graduation, but he graduated anyway. Although it was 1969, the height of the Vietnam War, a year when more than a quarter million young men were drafted and other Indianans were being told it would take years to get into the National Guard, Quayle landed a spot in a week flat, after a retired Guard general who worked for his family made a call on his behalf. Quayle was rejected by Indiana University Law School, but he got in anyway- under an affirmative action program, after he visited the dean of admissions, a Republican judge in a city (Indianapolis) where Quayle’s grandfather owned the newspaper. (Soon thereafter, the grandfather made a large contribution to the law school.) Quayle was indifferent law student, but he got a job in the state attorney general’s office anyway. (His father made a few calls.) He was a twenty-nine year old employee of his father’s paper, but he got elected to Congress anyway, with the help of the paper and his own good looks. He was a poor congressman, but he got elected to Senate anyway, in the 1980 Reagan landslide. Two years later the DePauw faculty voted against giving him an honorary degree, but he got it anyway. He was a mediocre senator, but Bush put him on the national ticket anyway. He blew the debate, but he’ll probably be elected vice president anyway. At this rate he’ll be president by cherry blossom time.

The House of Commons is full of fat and pompous plutocrats…Public schools are cradles of sickening snobbery.

Powerful people maneuver for position and worry endlessly about who is in and who is out, who is up and who is down, forgetting those people whose toil and sweat sends us here and pays our way.

The great families have their privileges.

The power structure does what they want, when they want; then they try to find reasons to justify it

The best thing about being President is that it gets you out of American life. I don't know what the theory is behind this, but it is a fact. The first thing we do with a President is shunt him off to a siding where nothing American can ever happen to him.

Politicians only get to the top because they have no qualifications to detain them at the bottom.

It is proper to demand more from the man with exceptional advantages than from the man without them… To the great body of men who have had exceptional advantages in the way of educational facilities we have a right, then, to look for good service to the state.

People seem to think that if a man is a Member of Parliament he may do what he pleases.

We [politicians] have a bad habit of not putting ourselves in the place of those we are trying to represent, and whose needs we are supposed to be considering.

As with most politicians, it took a disaster for them to do something.

I have never felt out of place in my entire life. But I did at Yale.