Top 99 Quotes & Sayings by Clive Lewis

Labour can and must offer hope: not the falsehood that it will do everything, but the real promise that it can help us help each other.

On their deathbed, do people think: 'I wish I'd spent more time with my Ferrari'? Or do they say: 'I wish I'd spent more time watching my kids grow up, I wish I'd spent more time country walking?' It's about the things that matter in life, and how we have an economy that better reflects that.

As in many British organisations, subtle institutionalised discrimination may well prevail. But in all my time in the army I've never experienced overt racism.

We can't grow as a party, if we're afraid of having difficult conversations.

Leadership and punching above your weight doesn't necessarily always have to mean gunboat diplomacy and bombing other countries into the stone age. It can actually mean leading by example, and helping other countries.

I know what it's like to feel the fear of battle. To be constantly looking over my shoulder and thinking every sound might be a bomb or a bullet. When I served in Afghanistan in 2009 I felt that fear, but I made a choice to serve in the army and I knew I could come home to safety at the end of my tour.

A leadership competition is not an ideal context for honest reflection. The aim is, after all, to win, not to learn and build.

Like many black people, I initially viewed the armed forces with a degree of suspicion.

There is nothing efficient about firms spurning more productive technologies because years of unrelenting attacks on social safety nets and collective bargaining have created cheap labour in abundance.

Tackling climate change can make us world leaders in burgeoning markets for green technology.

The U.K. could become a global leader in decommissioning skills and technology as we move to a net-zero-carbon economy.

With its brutal empire and legalised slavery, the Roman Republic was hardly a towering beacon of progressive values.

We are looking at ways to shift the balance of taxation away from work and on to the practices that are destroying the environment on which a healthy economy depends.

To describe 'Mutually Assured Destruction' as an 'insurance policy' would be comical if it wasn't such an appalling concept.

The genius of the market is supposed to lie in its ability to allocate society's resources to their most efficient uses without central direction. Labour has long recognised that efficiency doesn't always correspond with what is socially optimal or, in other words, 'fair.'

A lot of people would like to see the monarchy scaled down.

I'm known for wearing tweed jackets, khaki pants and suede shoes. I've only worn a suit in parliament under duress, when I was on the front bench.

As an MP, it is my job to hold the government to account.

The British public deserve real choices not forced, technocratic arguments about variations of the same dead end arguments.

While as black people we've paid for our right to be in this country many, many times over, I still can't help but feel we psychologically still see ourselves as outsiders. I believe this is our country. As such we need to embrace it fully.

I don't want to manage the labour movement, I want to unleash it.

Central to being a humanist, which I am, is the core understanding that doubt and criticism are essential attributes in the quest for knowledge.

Boris Johnson tried to prorogue parliament to get his disaster of a Brexit through, bringing hundreds of thousands out onto the streets for the 'Stop The Coup' protests, and seeing his cynical strategy overturned by the Supreme Court in the process.

The 2017 general election showed how quickly support can skyrocket.

Unanimous votes are rare in parliament.

The 21st century has more potential than perhaps any other in our brief evolutionary history. We stand on the cusp of computing, genetic and energy generation breakthroughs that were only recently in the realm of science-fiction. A golden age of humanity is tantalisingly within our grasp.

My vision for the country is of warmth and energy. A country that starts every conversation and every project - either in business or politics - with a belief in the best in people. This is the hopeful creed of a 21st-century socialism.

I think many of the virtues and values of the army are very similar to the virtues and values of socialism, of the Labour Party. It's about looking out for each other, it's about working as a team, it's about understanding.

I haven't come from a background where I've had it imbued in me from an early age that I'm destined to lead or to rule.

On everything from climate change to the housing crisis, we need solutions that are credible, bold and radical.

I'd rather see us as citizens than subjects in the 21st Century.

The only time that Labour has convincingly come from opposition to win has been in 1997 in the post-war period. And to do that we had to tack quite substantially to the right.

When I was growing up, my dad wore a lot of browns and greens - darker colours, autumnal colours. When I was on the BBC news trainee scheme, around the turn of the millennium, we had someone come in and talk to us about what you wear on television, and I was told that khakis, greens and browns went very well with my skin tone.

History is littered with leaders and movements, now long vanished and mostly forgotten, who failed to get to the deep truths of how and why their defeat happened.

We must be open to creating alliances of progressive and socialist organisations on a local level, particularly given the undemocratic electoral system face.

Understandably, the electorate places great faith in the professional soldiers and strategists that run our military.

The U.K. government faces three choices to deal with carbon-heavy fossil fuels: force people to stop using them immediately; facilitate a rapid transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy; or hope business-as-usual market forces solve our problem for us.

My message to Thunberg and all of her British counterparts is simple: the Labour party's door is open. We hear you, and we will work with you to do what needs to be done.

During his time at BHS, Sir Philip Green treated the company as his own personal plaything. Instead of investing in its branches and developing its brand, he ran down the pension scheme and used the company to line his own pockets.

Labour under Jeremy Corbyn is not afraid to take on the very wealthiest, committing to the most comprehensive anti-tax avoidance plan ever presented by a major political party.

Political status does not necessarily depend on nuclear capability.

The need for heroes, to admire them, to be inspired by them, runs deep in our cultural and social make-up.

No doubt relinquishing our nuclear arsenal would irritate Washington but what would the U.S. rather have, the U.K. able to assist in military operations or an ill-equipped conventional force and a nuclear arsenal which will never come into play?

In his 40s, my dad refound his youth a bit, and started going to the West Indian club in Northampton, where I'm from, where the West Indian diaspora would go to socialise on a Friday night, and have a drink and a dance to soca and the like.

The values that underpin Nato are social democratic values: liberty, democracy, freedom of expression.

Ultimately, if BEIS fails in the historic tasks Theresa May has given it, we will all pay a heavy price.

I'm fed up with the top-down style of politics, where discussion in our party is stifled because of sectarianism and tribalism.

I've got uncles who wore garish stuff, you know, electric blue polyester suits, and they carried it off. But my dad never went down that path, he has never been into loud stuff. His style was fashionable, but never sharp.

Good businesses are the lifeblood of the economy. But, as responsible business people up and down the country know, the system too often allows good businesses to be undercut by bad.

People have to remember that the armed forces do as democratically elected governments tell them to do. They don't arbitrarily go into countries and kick off. These are decisions that are made by our politicians.

Frankly, I want to be in government with Caroline Lucas, not against her - and certainly not in permanent opposition.

Labour are determined to create a fair, sustainable tax system in an economy that works for everyone.

Labour can no longer impose a future on the country, instead it must negotiate one.

In politics, sometimes, you dig your heels in and draw a line in the sand and refuse to compromise.

The top-down, vertical power relationships of the past are being replaced by a more evenly distributed, bottom-up variety.

Many of us mistakenly believe a coup d'etat is the only kind of coup possible. But a coup doesn't always require tanks on a lawn and senior ranking military types appearing on your TV and radio declaring that democracy as you knew it, is now over.

Serving your country in the U.S. brings not just peer respect but also the chance to learn new skills and receive a college education. The U.K.'s armed forces offer a similar deal.

Changes that are being enhanced by technological innovation (social media being a case in point) are happening at an increasing rate.

I couldn't watch 'BP' for a long time, until I started doing this job, because I knew in my heart that 'Blue Planet,' as beautiful as it was, at the end they would always have the human impact, and I struggled to watch it because I felt so powerless.

There is nothing efficient about destroying the planet as we know it because vested interests want to keep us addicted to fossil fuels.