Members Of The European Parliament

"The poverty and unemployment which we came into existence to fight have been largely conquered."

"The best man in my Cabinet."

"Barbara Castle was a woman of fire and conviction who was also elegant, attractive and consciously so. She had been shaped by the great depression, the war, and the determination of a post-war Labour government that the old class-ridden Britain must be transformed. She was an ideologue and a class warrior, but one committed to the poor and the unemployed, an icon of Old Labour. She was also considerate and brave."

"Her passion blazed and her courage held steady throughout her long life. [Her] dazzling charm and low cunning won and kept the admiration and affection of the Labour movement for nearly 60 years. She was fiery, funny, stylish and a socialist to her last breath."

"She was a wonderful fighter for socialism from her early days to the last. She gave her whole being to the Labour movement. Her last fight was for the pensioners and she helped to change that too."

"Barbara was a heroine of the Labour movement who brought in equal pay for women, and right up to her death was campaigning for the cause of justice for the elderly. She made a massive contribution to the 20th century and her achievements will never be forgotten."

"[Barbara Castle was] an extraordinary pioneer for women in politics. Barbara Castle was one of the dominating figures of the Labour movement of the last 50 years. She was courageous, determined, tireless and principled, she was never afraid to speak her mind or stand up for her beliefs. Britain has lost one of its great political figures and the Labour movement a great heroine."

"As a right-winger and UKIP member, I believe in immigration. That sentence might sound slightly surprising coming from the General Secretary of a Party which is perceived by the media as anti-immigration. So let me explain. I reject uncontrolled immigration. I reject immigration beyond the ability of our country's infrastructure to cope. Recently, I’ve been listening to the Bruce Springsteen song "American Land". It starts off well enough, talking about people relocating to America as it grew and helping to build the country. That's the kind of immigration that I believe in. Those who believe that they can have a better life (in this case in the UK), who come over and are determined to see themselves as part of British culture and will put their heart and soul into improving this country for all of us. I'm talking about the kind of person who is proud to come to the United Kingdom and shows that pride at every opportunity. Such people are a real asset to the country. That's why I'm so angry at the 'left-wing' in British politics, which has consistently pursued an effective open-door immigration policy. Uncontrolled mass immigration doesn't provide any of those benefits, but instead creates huge cultural problems for us. Worse still, it creates resentment. In Sheffield, I see workers losing their jobs to immigrant workers. All that does is create resentment and fuels the kind of racism that we've painstakingly worked to get rid of from our nation."

"The EU cannot be a world player. It is trying to mould 28 distinctly different member countries together to form and enact policy, whilst also looking to bring in new countries whose views and politics will not necessarily be a natural fit to what we have today, to the detriment of sections of its citizenship. This makes the EU look and act weakly, a trait that has been seized upon by Putin for one, and which has now led to intentionally breaking international law. Far from guaranteeing peace as envisaged at the outset, the EU brings us, both politically and physically, closer to new conflicts, at home and abroad."

"As UKIP’s health spokesman at the last General Election, I can say with gladness that now we have voted to leave, our treasured NHS will now be safe from the clutches of the EU/US TTIP agreement that would have seen American drug and insurance companies elbow their way into our healthcare. I would have thought that the local Green Party would at least join me in celebrating on this issue."

"Whilst ‘Remain’ campaigners are obviously disappointed in the result, most are taking it on the chin and yielding to the democratic process, forgoing the need to insult those who happen to have voted differently."

"Austerity may still be felt here in the North West but Brussels doesn’t even know the meaning of the word."

"As a newly elected UKIP MEP, I had mixed feelings about my first visit to the European Parliament in Brussels. After all, I am visiting a parliament which I believe shouldn’t exist; however, I should, and will be there to act as the eyes and ears of the British people."

"Mr Batten's obsession with Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (to use Tommy Robinson’s real name) and fixation with the issue of Islam makes Ukip unrecognisable to many of us. While Robinson may hold an appeal to some members of society who feel they are disenfranchised, I believe he is entirely unsuitable to be involved in any political party. The fact is that his entourage includes violent criminals and ex-BNP members. [...] Next to Robinson is a man called Daniel Thomas, a convicted armed kidnapper. There are other pretty unsavoury-looking characters dotted around the room. [...] And so, with a heavy heart, and after all my years of devotion to the party, I am leaving Ukip today."

"Tommy Robinson is not far-right... and does not have far-right views. He is someone who can give some information and research which is useful to me. We have always been a democratic, non-racist party. That has always been in our constitution and that is exactly the way we are going to keep it. It is very odd in this day and age when you get called far-right, when what you have spent the last 25 years trying to do is to return government to our own democratically elected Parliament."

"What we do know is that if we do not leave the EU it will mark the end of democracy in the UK."

"If Parliament does not take Britain out of the European Union it will be the biggest constitutional crisis since the English Civil War. In 1642 the king put himself in opposition to parliament. Parliament won and the king lost his head."

"[Having described Tommy Robinson as a "high profile" figure who had been "persecuted by the state because of his views".] I think he's a good person to have on side, a lot of people respect his stand on things and his courage."

"We are determined to protect our freedom of speech and the right to speak our minds without fear of the politically correct thought-police knocking on our doors."

"Instead of asking the EU how we may leave we should have been explaining to them how we are going to leave."

"Freedom cannot be expected to tolerate that which would destroy it. Fundamentalist and extremist Islam is incompatible with freedom and Western liberal democracy. The real issue for those wishing to remain free is not an argument about headdress but the threat posed to our freedoms and way of life by a minority of people and how the state chooses to deal with it - if indeed it has the courage to do so at all."

"Successive governments have refused to accept the threat posed to our society by Islamic fundamentalism and extremism and to take the necessary measures to meet it head-on. We should esteem our own values of freedom, free speech and liberal secular democracy and start defending them."

"Nationally the fight against the out of touch elite goes on. We have Boris Johnson calling for the government to hand out passports to illegal immigrants. We have Labour’s David Lammy asking MPs to reject the referendum result. We have Tories such as Dan Hannan MEP who is calling for the Brexit deal to include free movement. We have defeated the EU and now it’s time to rid Westminster of the establishment."

"The people of Wales voted to leave the European Union and return our United Kingdom to the status of an independent democracy."

"The result was a historic achievement, the people have risen up against the establishment and said enough is enough. For the last 25 years UKIP and Nigel Farage have been leading the charge to get Britain out of the EU. We have been abused and ridiculed but we fought on regardless. UKIP will continue to go from strength to strength."

"Brexit won't be easy, but it can be made to work for everyone. The first step in making Brexit a success is accepting it, and discussing the topic in a grown up and constructive manner. I'm sick of the constant nastiness and negativity; is there any wonder that people have such little trust in politicians when time is wasted on vicious personal attacks instead of trying to work together to get the best deal for everyone."

"[Tommy Robinson is] entitled to speak at rallies organised by people who believe in democracy"

"Are these good reasons for worrying about the apparent contradiction? Should either make us feel the need of an explanation?"

"Even if Melissus’s analysis of the concept of existence is faulty, his procedure is very interesting. He challenges the data of sense experience by appealing to conceptual truths, facts about what a certain predicate (here ‘true’) must entail. These facts seem to escape the need to appeal to sense experience. We check up what is true about being true by examining our notion of being true, not by checking any things in the external world. So the argument seems to find a way of challenging the value of sense experience without begging the question. Melissus casts doubt on the senses by privileging the logical grammar of the word ‘true’. But, we might ask, did we learn how to use the word ‘true’ without relying on the senses?"

"Both Democritus and Anaxagoras try to explain the puzzling behaviour of ordinary reality by appeal to a microscopic replica of reality, in which another set of tiny bodies or minute scraps of stuff move around and cause things to happen. As a way to overcome the difficulty of explaining changes in the world, this ultimately emerges as unsatisfying: if there were problems with explaining chemical and physical events as they appear to us, there will be the same problems with explaining the reactions between smaller and yet smaller bodies."

"Plato’s metaphysics grew out of that of Parmenides, together with a strong feel for Heraclitus’s account of the physical world as a world of incessant change. His ethics were deeply inspired by Socrates, but his views on the soul also pick up on motifs that emerge in Pythagoras."

"For Heraclitus, the logos is something that we need to learn to notice if we are to understand the true significance of the world. It manifests itself all around us but, Heraclitus suggests, only a few intelligent people ever realize what is going on."

"Perhaps Heraclitus lived before Parmenides, perhaps he lived after, perhaps he lived at the same time. Whichever way, his sayings cry out to be read in their own right, as a radically anti-materialist project unlike anything previously known. They bitterly resist the attempt to package them along with the pre-Parmenidean thinkers; they flourish in a situation in which we are able to juxtapose them with alternatives, such as Parmenides’s world view, for which they may indeed have been a foil."

"Philosophy has come to include, for us, a wide range of theoretical questions that typically look beyond what we can answer by experimental enquiries. While science asks how matter behaves, and tests its theories with observation, philosophy asks what matter is, or how observation can teach us anything. While mathematics asks what the sum of 2 and 7 is, philosophy asks what the number 2 is, and whether 2 plus 7 could ever make anything but 9."

"Much of the content of so-called Pythagorean teaching appears to be a mix of mystical gobble-de-gook and adulatory veneration of the genius of the founder."

"Sophistry is one of the methods by which politicians dress up their policies in alien clothing, to pass them off as more desirable than they really are. Spin doctors thrive best where ‘democracy’ is the slogan."

"As the Presocratic philosophers bow out and Plato arrives to direct the next drama in the series, the Sophists make an astounding final act. All singing, all dancing, they ask society to question its raison d’être, its political beliefs, its moral values, its religious beliefs, its educational system, its legal codes, and its codes of etiquette. They draw attention to the power of the media and ask us to consider whether, without the media, there would be any truth at all. The antagonism that they generate, as portrayed by the Socrates imagined in Plato’s dialogues, starts the ball rolling for some of the most exacting philosophical endeavours the world has ever seen."

"In the Protagoras Socrates persuades Protagoras that goodness is identical with pleasure. He advocates a form of hedonism. In the Gorgias, Callicles espouses hedonism and Socrates refutes him. Socrates gets Callicles to admit that, after all, some pleasures are not good. [...] So Socrates holds contradictory views on pleasure in the Protagoras and the Gorgias."

"Plato not only permitted live philosophical enquiry to take place in the course of every reader’s every reading of the dialogue, by putting tempting and plausible views on trial, in a situation as near as possible to the open-minded exploratory give and take of dialectical debate with a real interlocutor. He also created a most fitting memorial to the real Socrates – the man himself, who lived and died for the idea that philosophy is best done in open-ended dialogue, and with your whole way of life at stake should you be refuted."

"Philosophy asks for a reason, not just a scientific fact."

"Besides the ‘how many?’ question, Empedocles seems to be answering two other ancient questions: ‘How did the world come to be as it now is?’ and ‘How did it come to have the creatures that it now has?’. [...] His answers are subtle and intricate."

"If we are to understand what is going on in Empedocles’s writings, we need to think about the philosophical motives that drive him, and we need to make use of the bits of text we already had before the papyrus turned up."

"Often, when thinking about Socrates (or about Plato’s depiction of Socrates), we need to remember that he is reacting to the Presocratics, but the reverse is never true."

"Whether or not Zeno was merely trying to defend Parmenides from the ridicule of others, there is no doubt that he has pushed the analysis of reality onto a new plane. He makes us think not just about objects in space, but about space as a structure within which they exist; about motion not just as the behaviour of physical bodies, but as a theoretical concept involving conceptual divisions in space and time; about number not just as a way of counting finite bodies but as a rational system potentially (or actually) continuing ad infinitum, with the problematic consequences that that might entail; about the notions of ‘before’ and ‘after’ in time, and how long the duration of the present is."

"Parmenides did for science what Plato would later do for morality and aesthetics as well: he alerts us to the fact that opinions are just opinions, and they may differ widely. There may yet be a single truth, which need not be as anyone thought. To search for knowledge is to search for access to the truth, not to collect other people’s opinions, and philosophy conducts its unrelenting search for truth in the steps of Parmenides, by respecting sound and rigorous logical argument rather than the variegated tapestry of unexamined opinions."

"Many aspects of Parmenides’s thought remain puzzling even when we have collected all the scraps of evidence from his own writings and those of later thinkers who discussed his views. But his immense significance in philosophical terms has never been obscured by the difficulties in the nitty-gritty of interpretation. For one thing, it is obvious that Parmenides throws at us the challenge of whether we should trust our reason or our senses, in circumstances when they seem to conflict."

"So, with due thanks to those great heroes, the ancient authorities, we can now move on with a more cheerful heart to the rest of Presocratic philosophy. Many of the Presocratics’ words are lost, but we may still catch a glimpse of their strange forgotten worlds, woven into a splendid patchwork of ancient quotations and interpretations."

"Xenophanes might be saying that we have only superficial understanding, and we never get to knowledge of the clear truth."

"By taking us on a cumulative sequence from our own familiar gods, through those of other ethnic groups, to those of animals, Xenophanes shows that our own images have no more authority than those of animals."

"I do not take my mandate from the European people."