Politician

If I'd not been a coal miner in the past, getting up very early, I wouldn't have been able to have done what I've been doing.

I don't think you should celebrate age.

I've never bothered about what people say about me.

I hate to say it because I voted against everything Thatcher did, but she had principles she believed in.

We have all lost before and we will win again.

I have worked out that I am living in London on ?27 a day while David Cameron is claiming a damn sight more for his big house in Oxford.

I didn't know when Parliament started to pay my wages.

I don't believe in organised happiness.

Cameron called me a dinosaur you know? Well I'm the only dinosaur who can ride a bike 12 miles a day.

There are only so many things you can do in life, and if you think I'm going to spend my waking hours thinking about some decency in some Tory or other, forget it.

Well, I don't believe in patronage.

I think if I hadn't been born in a pit village I'd have been part of a dramatic society.

I wouldn't take Father of the House even if I was offered it.

To be honest, it was slavery. Nobody should have any romantic ideas about working underground. It's very, very dangerous. You always knew you were living in danger. You were on your hands and knees half the day.

I've never sent an email to anybody. I believe in keeping the postman in work.

Parties are organised happiness but happiness is accidental. You can't legislate for it.

I still think carefully about what I'm going to say. I use me heart and head technique, in which the heart says, 'get stuck in, Dennis!', and the head says, 'just a minute... ' But I probably don't use this as often as some others.

I remember at one time there were 44 mining MPs.

You don't enter politics when you come to parliament. I was getting politics for breakfast, dinner and tea when I was a little kid.

I was shaped by a pit environment and the Second World War. My playground was on the pit tip at Clay Cross and I grew up with that mining background. My father was a miner and my granddad was a miner, and I would say three out of ten on the street where I was born were working in the pits.