“Britain in the 1970s was undoubtedly an economic mess because of the oil price explosion.”

You see, another reason for nationalization was that private ownership meant fragmentation.

It was very much a cry for democratic control at that time. Above all, breaking the accomplished power of a few people to rule the lives of everybody else.

Why get rid of Chamberlain to put in Halifax? It’s like getting rid of the organ-grinder to put in the monkey.

Large motorway flyovers are the cathedrals of the modern world.

And what always struck me about that war period was how even Churchill had to talk socialism to keep up people’s morale.

He described how, as a boy of 14, his dad had been down the mining pit, his uncle had been down the pit, his brother had been down the pit, and of course he would go down the pit.

I remember people who’d had a lot of hardship during the war. They’d thought we’d won.

I will fight for what I believe in until I drop dead. And that’s what keeps you alive.

Think, think, think. It will hurt like hell at first, but you’ll get used to it.

And that will increasingly dawn on people. The demand for controlling the commanding heights will grow.

I have never consciously exploited the fact that I am a woman. I wouldn’t dare try that even if I knew how to. I have too much respect for my male colleagues to think they would be particualrly impressed.

In politics, guts is all.

The flowering of human society depends on two factors: the intellectual power of outstanding men to conceive sound social and economic theories, and the ability of these or other men to make these ideologies palatable to the majority.

Economic prosperity is not so much a material problem; it is, first of all, an intellectual, spiritual, and moral problem.

A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart.

Fascism is definitely and absolutely opposed to the doctrines of liberalism, both in the political and economic sphere.

[E]conomic history is a long record of government policies that failed because they were designed with a bold disregard for the laws of economics

The interventionists do not approach the study of economic matters with scientific disinterestedness. Most of them are driven by an envious resentment against those whose incomes are larger than their own. This bias makes it impossible for them to see things as they really are.

I have always paid careful attention to social and economic conflicts, to the dialectic – if we can call it that – between high and low. Maybe it’s because I was not born or brought up in affluence.

State intervention in economic production arises only when private initiative is lacking or insufficient, or when the political interests of the State are involved. This intervention may take the form of control, assistance or direct management.