Top 108 Quotes & Sayings by David Lammy

As I have consistently recommended, we desperately need to find more black judges, particularly females, who are chronically underrepresented in our courts across London and the U.K.

Ultimately, we must either abandon our reliance on stop and search or abandon any hope for a criminal justice system grounded in equality, impartiality and fairness.

Mum was born in 1938 in Guyana and came to Britain at the end of the 60s. She settled in Tottenham, north London, and worked for London Transport and then as a home help, a care assistant and finally a local authority officer. Bringing up five children singlehandedly with little money can't have been easy, but she did it with tremendous style.

I tend not to read fiction - I'll read one novel a year during the summer - but I do read a lot of nonfiction.

I knew what it was to be poor... my mother worried about putting food on the table. I knew what it was to feel excluded and shut out, but I also knew what it was to experience love and generosity.

I spend much of my time in a suit and tie with my top button done up and my sensible shoes neatly polished. When it comes to work, my appearance is about communicating professionalism and confidence.

There were a lot of things I thought of doing as I was growing up, from becoming a singer to a priest to a pilot.

People 'demand' the opportunity to gamble away money they do not have, just like people 'demand' money from loan sharks at extortionate interest rates. This is a warped, empty type of freedom, in which the powerful are free to exploit the vulnerable.

I know what to say, how to say it, how to bring profile to the issues I care about and people want to listen to me.

My wife does all the driving.

Supporting Spurs is a bit like being in the Labour Party. It's a labour of love, believe me.

I remember singing as a chorister in Peterborough Cathedral, having won a music scholarship to go to school there, and realising for the first time in my life what true excellence was.

When I make a contribution in debates and in our public life, the House wants to hear what I say. It goes quiet - it wants to know what my opinion is.

Cities can be paradoxical places. In the mornings they buzz with commuters, in the evenings they come alive with diners and partygoers, at weekends the streets fill with shoppers and market traders. But amidst the hustle and bustle, even the greatest city can be a lonely place.

Too much of the Brexit rhetoric is based on the desire to go out and re-create Empire.

Music, dance, literature and the visual arts open up a rich and intensely rewarding world. It is a world that should not be the preserve of the few.

I think that's always something when you're working class, when you're aware of things that you haven't had; there are moments when you question yourself, definitely.

I'm a prolific tweeter. It allows me to respond to the news of the day or comment on something Jacob Rees-Mogg has said on behalf of my constituents.

My father was a taxidermist, not a run-of-the-mill profession for a West Indian immigrant. Having given up on becoming a vet, he settled for working with dead animals rather than live ones. Dad was a true craftsman, an artist.

I'm so bored of tribal politics. That's part of the problem. I'm so bored of it. I'm not a tribalist. That's not what turns me on.

I have very eclectic tastes. I love soul and Motown; I listen to some rap - Stormzy, Tinie Tempah, Drake. I also love classical music, American country and the folk tradition. I often start the day with gospel on my way to work. The only thing I have never got into is punk.

Edgy' music has always formed the cornerstone to any teenage rebellion. Most indulge in it precisely because adults like me don't like them doing so.

You can't be in business with international development and not understand basic issues of colonialism, postcolonialism and white privilege.

Stop and search is an integral cog in a racially disproportionate criminal justice system.

I'd always been the kind of lawyer that was attracted back to policy.

A good society is characterised not just by liberty but by mutual respect and responsibility. When this breaks down it takes a lot more than police officers to put things right.

Courts are too distant from the communities they put on trial.

Unemployed people should be treated as potential to be realised, not a problem to be solved.

If you're in the business of law you're in the business of representation and precedent.

Mum worked nonstop, doing two, sometimes three, jobs throughout the 80s.

Our political class obsesses over social mobility from one generation to the next - whether or not people are doing better than their parents did - but we rarely talk about those who are already in work and want to progress.

The ingrained image of black men being searched by the police feeds into the collective illusion that black men everywhere need to be policed more than others.

I've got a very full life beyond my career.

I'm not going to be cowed by the rampant racism, the organised racism, that comes from parts of the alt-right.

We cannot have different policing for different communities. It is inherently unfair.

Many single mothers do a heroic job looking after their children, as mine did with us; but as she found, it becomes twice as hard to set boundaries with half the number of parents.

Football is a great way for me to catch up with my sons, and to let off some steam from my professional life.

Like many black men growing up in London, I have been stopped and searched by several policemen. I was 12 years old when I was first groped and frisked by police for walking down the road. It terrified me so much I wet myself.

People don't contest that I'm British as a black man, but they do contest that I'm English. Too many people are going back to an ethnocentric idea of what being English means.

I grew up under Thatcher; the era of apartheid; the era of the poll tax; the era of riots. I remember Neil Kinnock was a hero.

For even the most seasoned observers of American politics, Barack Obama is a phenomenon.

If companies shared profits with their workers, employers and employees would have a greater mutual interest in each other's success.

My biggest fear growing up was that I would end up in prison. That was the fate of growing numbers of my peers.

Parenting is more than a numbers game: it's a question of whether people are equipped for the toughest job they will ever be asked to do.

I'm just not convinced that the British people I know and love are interested in revolution.

From protecting consumers to establishing common standards and promoting free trade, the E.U. plays a central role. And nation states alone cannot tackle common threats such as climate change without the co-ordination that the E.U. and other supranational institutions provide.

We look around at our national politicians, we do not see national politicians who are without fault. And, actually, we see quite a lot who get very far - let's take Boris Johnson- with considerable. White. Privilege. Failure after failure after failure rewarded.

I'm not one of those people for which politics is my sole preoccupation.

From closing the digital divide to after-school activities and eating well, we cannot afford to ignore the link between deprivation and underachievement.

White supremacy is not confined to strange men in the Deep South who put on white cloaks, it is not confined to strange gatherings of the English Defence League.

We need specific work on race equality programmes and programmes targeted at helping those who are yet to fulfil their potential.

Separate but equal is a fraud.

When I was growing up, I wanted to be Michael Jackson. I used to sing and dance and perform with my sister at parties for 50p.

I'm a legislator, but it's hard to legislate when my party's out of power.

Many black youths are defying stereotypes, achieving good academic results, finding employment and contributing to their communities. But helping those who fall behind is not an exercise in political correctness, it is a precisely what a compassionate - and sensible - state should concern itself with.

A good life depends on the strength of our relationships with family, friends, neighbours, colleagues and strangers.

People who have no stake in society are the least likely to have respect for it.

Fathers need to be made aware of their responsibilities - and that's up to all of us to communicate, as parents, as politicians and as members of a community.

I certainly knew the hard side of urban life, stop-and-search.

I was obsessed with Nelson Mandela. I had big posters of him in my bedroom and he became my proxy father figure. He was in jail, so I could project all sorts of things about what he would say to me.