| # | Quote |
|---|
| 1 | We are discriminating against homosexuals by excluding them from marriage. We are discriminating, therefore against a polygamist. I'm a polygamist, you see, and I'm discriminated against because I'm not allowed to marry several women. Don't I have a case to say that's discriminatory? I think that you have to say, 'Look, we're going to deal with this on the basis of looking at where the law is discriminatory, and we're going to eliminate discrimination.' Be very careful of that argument, is all I'm saying. If you start basing your argument on non-discrimination, you land in some funny places. |
| 2 | I always had my worries about Jimmy (Jimmy Savile), because he was a very odd fellow.... I would not have been surprised to find he was having homosexual relationships with young people. |
| 3 | It's interesting that it's allowed for one group of people to insult and shout names at another group without any restriction, but if I were to shout names at that group they would immediately say I was committing a hate crime. No, I'm not a homophobe. |
| 4 | Perhaps deconstructing marriage would be a dangerous and harmful thing to society... I just think, why don't they go and do something else? |
| 5 | When we have a queen who is a lesbian and she marries another lady and then decides she would like to have a child and someone donates sperm and she gives birth to a child, is that child heir to the throne? |
| 6 | [on gay marriage] It would lift my worries about inheritance tax because maybe I'd be allowed to marry my son. Why not? Why shouldn't a mother marry her daughter? Why shouldn't two elderly sisters living together marry each other? |
| 7 | I did not know Jimmy Savile well and first met him only when my wife and I found ourselves in the spinal unit which had been built by his trust. I always regarded him as somewhat odd, to put it mildly, but he was a tireless worker in raising money for good causes and he gave me some very good advice about how to manage charities working with and within the NHS. Those who allowed him to abuse young children have a heavy responsibility for their complicity in whatever he may have done. They should have dealt with that many years ago. However, I am not sure how much good will come out of some of the recriminations about Savile himself. It is now open season for almost anyone to make allegations about him and he is unable to defend himself. A dead man cannot be put on trial. Nor can he defend himself. Sadly the whole affair may underline that the good men may do is often interred with their bones, but the evil they did lives on after them. |
| 8 | [on Cecil Parkinson] We lost him because of his affair with his secretary whereas, these days, somebody like Prescott survives while having an affair in his office with his tax-payer-provided secretary. |
| 9 | [on civil partnerships for gay couples] I didn't see the necessity for it. All those things could be arranged between the parties. People have often said to me that, if they were homosexuals, their rights were inferior to mine but that's not so. A homosexual has the right to marry a woman but he just doesn't choose to. |
| 10 | [on John Major's affair with Edwina Currie] I just thought it was a wonderful illustration of mutual bad taste. |
| 11 | I never imagined that under a Conservative Prime Minister we would have to put up with a Deputy Prime Minister who would begin to make John Prescott look good. (On Nick Clegg) |
| 12 | London cabbies usually address me as "Norm", to many others I'm "Lord T" , the very correct use "My Lord", the less so, "Oy, you" - but please not Sir Norman or Mr Tebbit, as they are simply not correct. |
| 13 | Blair's (Tony Blair) poisonous legacy to his heir Cameron (David Cameron) was not just a financially incontinent country, but one with a submerged underclass addicted to welfare. Ill-educated, ill-disciplined, near illiterate and innumerate unemployables living in families in which no one worked, ever had worked or wanted to work and living better than the working families next door. The shortage of decently educated, well-motivated employees has sucked in millions of immigrants, many from Central Europe, to do the jobs that our people are unwilling or unqualified to do. Then there are those from the Third World, some skilled, some employable, but many without any qualifications, not even the ability to speak English. All of those impose costs on the NHS, and impact on housing, schools, water, power and transport. |
| 14 | I think the puppets in Spitting Image (1984) are very clever indeed. I think the jokes are puerile, the script is puerile. It's a great pity that the script is not up to the standard of the puppets. |
| 15 | Because we were so preoccupied with the economic problems - and they were quite severe - I don't think we had the time or the people to deal with the social problems which were beginning to grow then and which have, in the past 10 years, got so very much worse. It breaks my heart to see the number of kids in families who have never worked and, because they are very poorly educated, will probably never work. |
| 16 | I grew up in north-east London, on the working class streets, when there wasn't a fear of crime. Even during the war, in the blackout, my parents didn't worry about the fact I was walking back home. That is unthinkable now. |
| 17 | I recognise that in those mining towns and villages crime was very low, as was school truancy and yobbish behaviour, because here there was a close-knit social structure in which there was a great deal of social stability. The rapid collapse of the coal mining industry did break up those communities in a terrible manner. I think it was a contributory factor to what was going on in society and the change in a lot of our old inner cities, where once, even if you were Norman Tebbit, you could walk safely through the streets, and now, even if you're home secretary, you're scared at night out on your own. |
| 18 | Scargill (Arthur Scargill) and the NUM (National Union of Miners) were the nuclear weapons of the politically motivated trade unions, or trade union leaders. They exploded the nuclear weapon and at the end of it Thatcher (Margaret Thatcher) was still there, and Scargill was gone. She saw strong action on the strike as an effort to turn over the 1979 election by industrial action. Now you can agree with her or not, but I hope people would think the right way to get rid of a government is by the ballot box, not the picket line. |
| 19 | I remember the Welsh valley ethics of hard work at school, education, straight living. I'm absolutely with that and it makes me sad to see that old working class ethic has broken down. |
| 20 | For me the British Broadcasting Corporation might have been better called the Stateless Persons Broadcasting Corporation for it certainly did not reflect the mood of the British people who finance it. (On the BBC's coverage of the Falkland's War) |
| 21 | The word 'conservative' is used by the BBC as a portmanteau word of abuse for anyone whose views differ from the insufferable, smug, sanctimonious, naive, guilt-ridden, wet, pink orthodoxy of that sunset home of the third-rate minds of that third-rate decade, the nineteen-sixties. |
| 22 | Despite the ramblings and spoutings of the over excitable and scarcely rational children in Central office, the nation is not possessed by an overwhelming urge to fill the shadow Cabinet with 25-year-old black lesbians and homosexual, asylum-seeking Muslims. Alan Duncan's totally unsurprising announcement that he is 'gay' has on them the impact of a powder puff flung at an elephant. Britain is a very tolerant country. The great mass of us have no desire to emulate Mr Duncan's activities under his duvet... we do not wish to join in; we just wish profoundly that he would not bore us with his sexual problems. (Speaking in 2002) |
| 23 | The BBC was always against Lady Thatcher. |
| 24 | The Muslim religion is so unreformed since it was created that nowhere in the Muslim world has there been any real advance in science or art or literature or technology in the last 500 years. |
| 25 | It is certainly safe, in view of the movement to the right of intellectuals and political thinkers, to pronounce the brain death of socialism. |
$10 Million
