Top 23 Quotes & Sayings by Denis Healey

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a British politician Denis Healey.

Last updated on December 3, 2024.

Denis Winston Healey, Baron Healey was a British Labour Party politician who served as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1974 to 1979 and as Secretary of State for Defence from 1964 to 1970; he remains the longest-serving Defence Secretary to date. He was a Member of Parliament from 1952 to 1992, and was Deputy Leader of the Labour Party from 1980 to 1983. To the public at large, Healey became well known for his bushy eyebrows, his avuncular manner and his creative turns of phrase.

British - Politician | August 30, 1917 - October 3, 2015

Source: Wikipedia

The difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison wall.

Denis Healey

When you're in a hole, stop digging.

Denis Healey

It is a good thing to follow the First Law of Holes: if you are in one, stop digging.

Denis Healey

First law on holes - when you're in one, stop digging!

Denis Healey

War inside countries is all too common.

Denis Healey

Unless you understand the history of a situation, you can't ever hope to solve problems.

Denis Healey

We cannot hope to achieve full employment and sustain it until we have mastered inflation.

Denis Healey

Trying to create a sense of common interest does involve getting people actually to work together on common problems. It can't be created by law, that's why I disagree with the liberal approach becuase it's essentially a lawyer's approach.

Denis Healey

I often compare Margaret Thatcher with Florence Nightingale. She stalks through the wards of our hospitals as a lady with a lamp. Unfortunately, it's a blowlamp.

Denis Healey

Mrs Thatcher tells us she has given the French President a piece of her mind... not a gift I would receive with alacrity.

Denis Healey

World events do not occur by accident. They are made to happen, whether it is to do with national issues or commerce; and most of them are staged and managed by those who hold the purse strings.

Denis Healey

I've always criticised American policy when I've disagreed with it. Just as I've criticised British policy. I was violently anti-Suez and pro-American in 1956, just as I was violently anti-Soviet on the invasion of Hungary which took place at the same time.

Denis Healey

Squeeze property speculators until the pips squeak.

Denis Healey

The right hon. Gentleman will be known for ever as the only Chancellor in the post-war period who brought this country to the brink of bankruptcy.

Denis Healey

The Americans have a very active presence and policy in every single part of the world and if we broke with them, we would lose any possibility of influencing them. They would go in for global unilateralism, and the world would be a more dangerous place.

Denis Healey

Karl Marx himself preferred a glass of claret to the mug of tea affected by some of his recent converts.

Denis Healey

Nothing is more dangerous that the politician who uses politics as a surrogate for an unsatisfactory personal life.

Denis Healey

Socialism to me is establishing social control of power in society, and where that differs from liberalism for example which aims at a similar situation in some respects, is we think you can only establish control over power by changing the structure and distribution of power, notably economic power.

Denis Healey

I've got a happy marriage, which is the most important singular thing.

Denis Healey

If you’re in a hole, stop digging.

Denis Healey

Being attacked by him is like being savaged by a dead sheep.

Denis Healey

Many of us in the West have come to feel that the development of technology in the military and economic fields has produced a single world in which the central problems, both military and economic, are going to require co-operation rather than continued confrontation and competition.

Denis Healey

An aircraft which is used by wealthy people on their expense accounts, whose fares are subsidized by much poorer taxpayers.

Denis Healey