Government ministers of the United Kingdom

"Sorry, old cock, to leave it in this shape."

"The Conservative Party has one overriding concern in foreign policy, and that is the growth of Communist power and influence in the world, and the dangers it can bring for all of us."

"There comes a time in every man's life when he must make way for an older man."

"For God's sake, bring me a large Scotch. What a bloody awful country."

"I do not desire to give myself any fresh political label. Though the formation of the Union of Democratic Control it has been possible for me to work in close co-operation with several of your leaders and this joint effort on the part of the Labour members and radicals is having I think a very beneficial effect. I do not desire to alienate myself from any of my former political associates but rather to endeavour to urge them along the same path which I myself am treading."

"It is the intention of His Majesty's Government to lay on the table of both Houses of Parliament every treaty, when signed, for a period of 21 days, after which the treaty will be ratified and published and circulated in the Treaty Series. In the case of important treaties, the Government will, of course, take an opportunity of submitting them to the House for discussion within this period. But, as the Government cannot take upon itself to decide what may be considered important or unimportant, if there is a formal demand for discussion forwarded through the usual channels from the Opposition or any other party, time will be found for the discussion of the Treaty in question."

"Resolutions expressing Parliamentary approval of every Treaty before ratification would be a very cumbersome form of procedure and would burden the House with a lot of unnecessary business. The absence of disapproval may be accepted as sanction, and publicity and opportunity for discussion and criticism are the really material and valuable elements which henceforth will be introduced."

"When war is declared, Truth is the first casualty. books.google"

"The object of this volume is not to cast fresh blame on authorities and individuals, nor is it to expose one nation more than another to accusations of deceit."

"Falsehood is a recognized and extremely useful weapon in warfare, and every country uses it quite deliberately to deceive its own people, to attract neutrals, and to mislead the enemy. The ignorant and innocent masses in each country are unaware at the time that they are being misled, and when it is all over only here and there are the falsehoods discovered and exposed. As it is all past history and the desired effect has been produced by the stories and statements, no one troubles to investigate the facts and establish the truth."

"Lying, as we all know, does not take place only in war-time. Man, it has been said, is not "a veridical animal," but his habit of lying is not nearly so extraordinary as his amazing readiness to believe. It is, indeed, because of human credulity that lies flourish. But in war-time the authoritative organization of lying is not sufficiently recognized. The deception of whole peoples is not a matter which can be lightly regarded. A useful purpose can therefore be served in the interval of so-called peace by a warning which people can examine with dispassionate calm, that the authorities in each country do, and indeed must, resort to this practice in order, first, to justify themselves by depicting the enemy as an undiluted criminal; and secondly, to inflame popular passion sufficiently to secure recruits for the continuance of the struggle. They cannot afford to tell the truth. In some cases it must be admitted that at the moment they do not know what the truth is."

"People must never be allowed to become despondent; so victories must be exaggerated and defeats, if not concealed, at any rate minimized, and the stimulus of indignation , horror, and hatred must be assiduously and continuously pumped into the public mind by means of "propaganda.""

"The use of the weapon of falsehood is more necessary in a country where military conscription is not the law of the land than in countries where the manhood of the nation is automatically drafted into the Army, Navy, or Air Service. The public can be worked up emotionally by sham ideals. A sort of collective hysteria spreads and rises until finally it gets the better of sober people and reputable newspapers."

"A Government which has decided on embarking on the hazardous and terrible enterprise of war must at the outset present a one-sided case in justification of its action, and cannot afford to admit in any particular whatever the smallest degree of right or reason on the part of the people it has made up its mind to fight. Facts must be distorted, relevant circumstances concealed, and a picture presented which by its crude colouring will persuade the ignorant people that their Government is blameless, their cause is righteous, and that the indisputable wickedness of the enemy has been proved beyond question. A moment's reflection would tell any reasonable person that such obvious bias cannot possibly represent the truth. But the moment's reflection is not allowed; lies are circulated with great rapidity. The unthinking mass accept them and by their excitement sway the rest. The amount of rubbish and humbug that pass under the name of patriotism in war-time in all countries is sufficient to make decent people blush when they are subsequently disillusioned."

"At the outset the solemn asseverations of monarchs and leading statesmen in each nation that they did not want war must be placed on a par with the declarations of men who pour paraffin about a house knowing they are continually striking matches and yet assert they do not want a conflagration. This form of self-deception, which involved the deception of others, is fundamentally dishonest."

"War being established as a recognized institution to be resorted to when Governments quarrel, the people are more or less prepared. They quite willingly delude themselves in order to justify their own actions. They are anxious to find an excuse for displaying their patriotism, or they are disposed to seize the opportunity for the excitement and new life of adventure which war opens out to them. So there is a sort of national wink, everyone goes forward, and the individual, in his turn, takes up lying as a patriotic duty. In the low standard of morality which prevails in war-time, such a practice appears almost innocent."

"In calm retrospect we can appreciate better the disastrous effects of the poison of falsehood, whether officially, semi-officially, or privately manufactured. It has been rightly said that the injection of the poison of hatred into men's minds by means of falsehood is a greater evil in war-time than the actual loss of life. The defilement of the human soul is worse than the destruction of the human body. A fuller realization of this is essential."

"Another effect of the continual appearance of false and biased statement and the absorption of the lie atmosphere is that deeds of real valour, heroism, and physical endurance and genuine cases of inevitable torture and suffering are contaminated and desecrated; the wonderful comradeship of the battlefield becomes almost polluted. Lying tongues cannot speak of deeds of sacrifice to show their beauty or value. So it is that the praise bestowed on heroism by Government and Press always jars, more especially when, as is generally the case with the latter, it is accompanied by cheap and vulgar sentimentality. That is why one instinctively wishes the real heroes to remain unrecognized, so that their record may not be smirched by cynical tongues and pens so well versed in falsehood."

"When war reaches such dimensions as to involve the whole nation, and when the people at its conclusion find they have gained nothing but only observe widespread calamity around them, they are inclined to become more sceptical and desire to investigate the foundations of the arguments which inspired their patriotism, inflamed their passions, and prepared them to offer the supreme sacrifice. They are curious to know why the ostensible objects for which they fought have none of them been attained, more especially if they are the victors."

"When the generation that has known war is still alive, it is well that they should be given chapter and verse with regard to some of the best-known cries, catchwords, and exhortations by which they were so greatly influenced. As a warning, therefore, this collection is made. It constitutes only the exposure of a few samples. To cover the whole ground would be impossible."

"There is the concealment of truth, which has to be resorted to so as to prevent anything to the credit of the enemy reaching the public. A war correspondent who mentioned some chivalrous act that a German had done to an Englishman during an action received a rebuking telegram from his employer: "Don't want to hear about any good Germans"; and Sir Philip Gibbs, in Realities of War, says: "At the close of the day the Germans acted with chivalry, which I was not allowed to tell at the time.""

"In Vienna an enterprising firm supplied atrocity photographs with blanks for the headings so that they might be used for propaganda purposes by either side."

"Atrocity lies were the most popular of all, especially in this country and America; no war can be without them. Slander of the enemy is esteemed a patriotic duty. An English soldier wrote (The Times, September 15, 1914): "The stories in our papers are only exceptions. There are people like them in every army." But at the earliest possible moment stories of the maltreatment of prisoners have to be circulated deliberately in order to prevent surrenders. This is done, of course, on both sides. Whereas naturally each side tries to treat its prisoners as well as possible so as to attract others. The repetition of a single instance of cruelty and its exaggeration can be distorted into a prevailing habit on the part of the enemy."

"Contempt for the enemy, if illustrated, can prove to be an unwise form of falsehood. There was a time when German soldiers were popularly represented cringing, with their arms in the air and crying "Kamerad," until it occurred to Press and propaganda authorities that people were asking why, if this was the sort of material we were fighting against, had we not wiped them off the field in a few weeks."

"A good deal depends on the quality of the lie. You must have intellectual lies for intellectual people and crude lies for popular consumption, but if your popular lies are too blatant and your more intellectual section are shocked and see through them, they may (and indeed they did) begin to be suspicious as to whether they were not being hoodwinked too. Nevertheless, the inmates of colleges are just as credulous as the inmates of the slums."

"The narrowest patriotism could be made to appear noble, the foulest accusations could be represented as an indignant outburst of humanitarianism, and the meanest and most vindictive aims falsely disguised as idealism. Everything was legitimate which could make the soldiers go on fighting."

"War is fought in this fog of falsehood, a great deal of it undiscovered and accepted as truth. The fog arises from fear and is fed by panic. Any attempt to doubt or deny even the most fantastic story has to be condemned at once as unpatriotic, if not traitorous. This allows a free field for the rapid spread of lies. If they were only used to deceive the enemy in the game of war it would not be worth troubling about. But, as the purpose of most of them is to fan indignation and induce the flower of the country's youth to be ready to make the supreme sacrifice, it becomes a serious matter. Exposure, therefore, may be useful, even when the struggle is over, in order to show up the fraud, hypocrisy, and humbug on which all war rests, and the blatant and vulgar devices which have been used for so long to prevent the poor ignorant people from realizing the true meaning of war."

"It must be admitted that many people were conscious and willing dupes. But many more were unconscious and were sincere in their patriotic zeal. Finding now that elaborately and carefully staged deceptions were practised on them, they feel a resentment which has not only served to open their eyes but may induce them to make their children keep their eyes open when next the bugle sounds."

"Between nations, where the consequences are vital, where the destiny of countries and provinces hangs in the balance, the lives and fortunes of millions are affected and civilization itself is menaced, the most upright men honestly believe that there is no depth of duplicity to which they may not legitimately stoop. They have got to do it. The thing cannot go on without the help of lies. This is no plea that lies should not be used in war-time, but a demonstration of how lies must be used in war-time. If the truth were told from the outset, there would be no reason and no will for war. Anyone declaring the truth: "Whether you are right or wrong, whether you win or lose, in no circumstances can war help you or your country," would find himself in gaol very quickly. In war-time, failure to lie is negligence, the doubting of a lie a misdemeanour, the declaration of the truth a crime."

"When the people of one country understand how the people in another country are duped, like themselves, in war-time, they will be more disposed to sympathize with them as victims than condemn them as criminal, because they will understand that their crime only consisted in obedience to the dictates of authority and acceptance of what their Government and Press represented to them as the truth."

"There is nothing sensational in the way of revelations contained in these pages. All the cases mentioned are well known to those who were in authority, less well known to those primarily affected, and unknown, unfortunately, to the millions who fell. Although only a small part of the vast field of falsehood is covered, it may suffice to show how the unsuspecting innocence of the masses in all countries was ruthlessly and systematically exploited."

"There are some who object to war because of its immorality, there are some who shrink from the arbitrament of arms because of its increased cruelty and barbarity; there are a growing number who protest against this method, at the outset known to be unsuccessful, of attempting to settle international disputes because of its imbecility and futility. But there is not a living soul in any country who does not deeply resent having his passions roused, his indignation inflamed, his patriotism exploited, and his highest ideals desecrated by concealment, subterfuge, fraud, falsehood, trickery, and deliberate lying on the part of those in whom he is taught to repose confidence and to whom he is enjoined to pay respect."

"None of the heroes prepared for suffering and sacrifice, none of the common herd ready for service and obedience, will be inclined to listen to the call of their country once they discover the polluted sources from whence that call proceeds and recognize the monstrous finger of falsehood which beckons them to the battlefield."

"With respect to the present expedition, it is defensible on the ground that the enormous power of France enables her to coerce the weaker state to become the enemy of England...the law of nature is stronger than even the law of nations. It is to the law of self-preservation that England appeals for justification of her proceedings. It is admitted...that if Denmark had evidenced any hostility towards this country, then we should have been justified in measures of retaliation. How then is the case altered, when we find Denmark acting under the coercion of a power notoriously hostile to us? Knowing, as we do, that Denmark is under the influence of France, can there be the shadow of a doubt that the object of our enemy would have been accomplished? Denmark coerced into hostility stands in the same position as Denmark voluntarily hostile, when the law of self-preservation comes into play...England, according to that law of self-preservation which is a fundamental principle of the law of nations, is justified in securing, and therefore enforcing, from Denmark a neutrality which France would by compulsion have converted into an active hostility."

"Our military force at this moment is as efficient in discipline as it is in numbers; and this not only in the regular army, but in the militia, volunteers, and other descriptions of force. We have six hundred thousand men in arms, besides a navy of two hundred thousand. The masculine energies of the nation were never more conspicuous, and the country never at any period of its history stood in so proud and glorious a position, as at present. After a conflict for fifteen years, against an enemy whose power had been progressively increasing, we are still able to maintain the war with augmenting force and a population, by the pressure of external circumstances, consolidated into an impregnable military mass. Our physical strength has risen when it has been called for; and if we do not present the opposition of numerous fortresses to an invader as the continent does, we present the more insuperable barrier of a high-spirited, patriotic, and enthusiastic people."

"Is it wise to say to men of rank and property, who, from old lineage or present possessions have a deep interest in the common weal, that they live indeed in a country where, by the blessings of a free constitution, it is possible for any man, themselves only excepted, by the honest exertions of talents and industry, in the avocations of political life, to make him-self honoured and respected by his countrymen, and to render good service, to the state; that they alone can never be permitted to enter this career? That they may indeed usefully employ themselves, in the humbler avocations of private life, but that public service they never can perform, public honour they never shall attain? What we have lost by the continuance of this system, it is not for man to know. What we may have lost can more easily be imagined. If it had unfortunately happened that by the circumstances of birth and education, a Nelson, a Wellington, a Burke, a Fox, or a Pitt, had belonged to this class of the community, of what honours and what glory might not the page of British history have been deprived? To what perils and calamities might not this country have been exposed? The question is not whether we would have so large a part of the population Catholic or not. There they are, and we must deal with them as we can. It is in vain to think that by any human pressure, we can stop the spring which gushes from the earth. But it is for us to consider whether we will force it to spend its strength in secret and hidden courses, undermining our fences, and corrupting our soil, or whether we shall, at once, turn the current into the open and spacious channel of honourable and constitutional ambition, converting it into the means of national prosperity and public wealth."

"If our armies are not so numerous as those of other nations, they have qualities which render them more valuable. Those raised by voluntary enlistment are more effective than those raised by conscription; and I should think a general would feel much more confidence in an army raised as our armies are raised, than he could possibly have while leading to battle a band of slaves torn from their homes by force."

"I will venture to lay it down as a general principle, that there are no better means for securing the continuance of peace, than to have it known that the possessions in the neighbourhood of a foreign state are in a condition to repel attack. I am firmly persuaded that among nations, weakness will never be a foundation for security."

"I am far from wishing to treat lightly or inconsiderately the evils attendant upon a standing army. The history of those countries where standing armies have been allowed to usurp an ascendancy over the civil authorities, is a volume pregnant with instruction to every one. We may look at France, for instance, and derive a lesson of eternal importance. But when it is said, that in ancient Rome twelve thousand praetorian bands were potent enough to dispose of that empire according to their will and pleasure, it should be remembered that that was the result of a number of pre-disposing causes, which have no existence in England. Before the civil constitution of any country can be overturned by a standing army, the people of that country must be lamentably degenerate; they must be debased and enervated by all the worst excesses of an arbitrary and despotic government; their martial spirit must be extinguished; they must be brought to a state of political degradation, I may almost say of political emasculation, such as few countries experience that have once known the blessings of liberty."

"It has been said that that which has made England a great and an energetic nation, is the principle heretofore acted upon of maintaining a very low Peace establishment, while the Peace establishments of the continent have been uniformly high. I do not agree in that view of the subject. For my own part, I believe much of our financial embarrassment to have been caused by our former low Peace establishments, and to this circumstance the failure of many of our military operations may be traced."

"The honourable gentleman has alluded to the distresses and financial embarrassments of the country. I should be the last man to speak of those distresses in a slighting manner; but in considering the amount of our burdens, we ought not to forget under what circumstances those difficulties have been incurred. Engaged in an arduous struggle, single-handed and unaided, not only against all the powers of Europe, but with the confederated forces of the civilized world, our object was not merely military glory—not the temptation of territorial acquisition—not even what might be considered a more justifiable object, the assertion of violated rights and the vindication of national honour; but we were contending for our very existence as an independent nation. When the political horizon was thus clouded, when no human foresight could point out from what quarter relief was to be expected, when the utmost effort of national energy was not to despair, I would put to the honourable gentleman whether, if at that period it could have been shown that Europe might be delivered from its thraldom, but that this contingent must be purchased at the price of a long and patient endurance of our domestic burdens, we should not have accepted the conditions with gratitude? I lament as deeply as the honourable gentleman the burdens of the country; but it should be recollected that they were the price which we had agreed to pay for our freedom and independence."

"I reverence, as much as any one can do, the memory of those great men who effected the Revolution of 1688, and who rescued themselves and us from the thraldom of religious intolerance, and the tyranny of arbitrary power; but I think we are not rendering an appropriate homage to them, when we practice that very intolerance which they successfully resisted, and when we withhold from our fellow-subjects the blessings of that Constitution, which they established with so much courage and wisdom. ... that great religious radical, King William...intended to raise a goodly fabric of charity, of concord, and of peace, and upon which his admirers of the present day are endeavouring to build the dungeon of their Protestant Constitution. If the views and intentions of King William had been such as are now imputed to him, instead of blessing his arrival as an epoch of glory and happiness to England, we should have had reason to curse the hour when first he printed his footstep on our strand. But he came not here a bigoted polemic, with religious tracts in one hand, and civil persecution in the other; he came to regenerate and avenge the prostrate and insulted liberties of England; he came with peace and toleration on his lips, and with civil and religious liberty in his heart."

"If I wished to convince an impartial Englishman of the policy of abolishing these [anti-Catholic] laws, I should bid him repair to the south of Ireland; to mix with the Catholic gentry; to converse with the Catholic peasantry...to see what a fierce and unsocial spirit bad laws engender, and how impossible it is to degrade a people, without at the same time demoralizing them too. But if this should fail to convince him...I should then tell him to go among the Protestants of the north. There he would see how noble and generous natures may be corrupted by the possession of undue and inordinate ascendancy; there he would see men, naturally kind and benevolent, brought up from their earliest infancy to hate the great majority of their countrymen, with all the bitterness which neighbourhood and consanguinity infuse into quarrels; and not satisfied with the disputes of the days in which they live, raking up the ashes of the dead for food to their angry passions; summoning the shades of departed centuries, to give a keener venom to the contests of the present age."

"It is impossible for any man, of late, to have set foot beyond the shores of these islands, without observing with deep mortification a great and sudden change in the manner in which England is spoken of abroad; without finding, that instead of being looked up to as the patron, no less than the model, of constitutional freedom, as the refuge from persecution, and the shield against oppression, her name is coupled by every tongue on the continent with everything that is hostile to improvement, and friendly to despotism, from the banks of the Tagus to the shores of the Bosphorus...time was, and that but lately, when England was regarded by Europe as the friend of liberty and civilization, and therefore of happiness and prosperity, in every land; because it was thought that her rulers had the wisdom to discover, that the selfish interests and political influence of England were best promoted by the extension of liberty and civilization. Now, on the contrary, the prevailing opinion is, that England thinks her advantage to lie in withholding from other countries that constitutional liberty which she herself enjoys."

"When Bonaparte was to be dethroned, the Sovereigns of Europe called up their people to their aid; they invoked them in the sacred names of Freedom and National Independence; the cry went forth throughout Europe: and those, whom Subsidies had no power to buy, and Conscriptions no force to compel, roused by the magic sound of Constitutional Rights, started spontaneously into arms. The long-suffering Nations of Europe rose up as one man, and by an effort tremendous and wide spreading, like a great convulsion of nature, they hurled the conqueror from his throne. But promises made in days of distress, were forgotten in the hour of triumph...The rulers of mankind...had set free a gigantic spirit from its iron prison, but when that spirit had done their bidding, they shrunk back with alarm, from the vastness of that power, which they themselves had set into action, and modestly requested, it would go down again into its former dungeon. Hence, that gloomy discontent, that restless disquiet, that murmuring sullenness, which pervaded Europe after the overthrow of Bonaparte; and which were so unlike that joyful gladness, which might have been looked for, among men, who had just been released from the galling yoke of a foreign and a military tyrant. In 1820 the long brooding fire burst out into open flame; in Germany it was still kept down and smothered, but in Italy, in Spain, and in Portugal, it overpowered every resistance."

"We shall drink the cause of Liberalism all over the world. The reign of Metternich is over and the days of the Duke's policy might be measured by algebra, if not by arithmetic."

"[The French government's] assurances of friendship and peace are indeed incessant and uniform, but they continue actively preparing for war when nobody threatens them, and while every day discloses more and more their designs upon Belgium, and the underhand proceedings which they are carrying on with reference to that country. They every day betray an unceasing disposition to pick a quarrel, and to treat us in a manner to which we can never submit. Pray take care, in all your conversation with Sebastiani, to make him understand that our desire for peace will never lead us to submit to affront either in language or in act."

"Proneness to changes and fondness for experiment have never been the character of the English nation. They have, on the contrary, been remarkable for tenacious adherence to existing institutions, and for stubborn resistance even to plausible innovations. Striking, indeed, is the contrast which, in this respect, they exhibit with their next door neighbours of the continent; for while France boasts of the newness and freshness of her institutions, the people of England place their pride and attachment in the antiquity of theirs. So hard, indeed, is it to bring this nation to consent to great and important changes, that some of those measures which impartial posterity will stamp with the mint-mark of purest wisdom, and most unalloyed good, have only been wrung from the reluctant consent of England, after long and toilsome years of protracted discussion; and even such acts as the re-admission of the Catholics of the pale of the constitution, and the prohibition of the traffic in the flesh and blood of man, were each of them the achievement of a hard-fought contest of many years."

"The landed interest is the great foundation upon which rest the fabric of society, and the institutions of the country. I mean no disparagement to manufactures and commerce; I know how essential they are to the happiness and prosperity of the country, and how much they add even to the value of the land. But the land of the country is the country itself, and the owner of the land has the deepest and most permanent interest in its well-being; tied down to the soil, he must share the fortunes of his country, whether in its greatness or its fall."

"I never can admit that it can be wise to give way to the unjust pretensions of France for the purpose of gaining for the French government...the support of the violent party, or even of the moderate encroachers. Depend upon it, no good is gained by such concessions; you only whet the appetite instead of satisfying it. We should betray our own weakness and encourage fresh demands."

"Governments are not at liberty to act solely from motives of generous sympathy for the sufferings of an oppressed people, they are bound by the severer rules of general principles, to respect rights which are inherent in other nations."

"I see those pretended politicians who place all their subtlety, and who think they serve their country best, in circumventing those with whom they treat, interpreting the conditions of a treaty in such a manner, that all the advantage results to their own country. Far from blushing at conduct so contrary to equity, to right, and to national honesty, they boast of their dexterity, and pretend that they deserve the name of great negociators. How long shall public men boast of conduct which would disgrace a private individual? ...Shall powerful states abandon openly that which is honest, for that which may appear useful? It often happens for the happiness of the human race, that this pretended utility is fatal to the powers who follow it, and that, even among sovereigns, candour and right are found to be the safest policy."

"Constitutional States I consider to be the natural Allies of this country and whoever may be in office conducting the affairs of Great Britain, I am persuaded that no English Ministry will perform its duty if it be inattentive to the interests of such States."

"I will not talk of non-intervention, for it is not an English word."

"The interests of civilization, the interests of commerce, and the interests of political independence, were all the interests of England, and all had been signally promoted by the emancipation of Greece."

"Any insult offered to His Majesty's flag, however small the vessel which bears it, would be resented and avenged by all the means which Great Britain can command, [and] any hindrance opposed to the execution of these orders will be considered as an act of hostility."

"I cannot help regretting that honourable gentlemen on the other side of this House should, in all the views which they announce on questions of foreign policy, seem always, by some fatality, to sympathize with arbitrary and despotic government. I cannot help regretting that they should view with averted and disdainful eye the efforts of every country which is endeavouring to establish freedom, and that they should condemn those so pointedly, who, by good offices or friendly co-operation, engage in the attempt to assist such nations in forming free establishments"

"Now the English nation is able to make war, but it will only do so where its own interests are concerned. We are a simple and practical nation, a commercial nation; we do not go in for chivalrous enterprises or fight for others as the French do."

"In the outset, I must deny the charge made personally against myself, and against the Government to which I belong, of an identification with the interests of other nations...I am satisfied that the interest of England is the Polar star—the guiding principle of the conduct of the Government; and I defy any man to show, by any act of mine, that any other principle has directed my conduct, or that I have had any other object in view than the interests of the country to which I belong."

"[T]he object they [the Five Powers] have in view is to maintain the integrity of the Turkish Empire; and they have a right to maintain that integrity, because its maintenance is necessary for upholding the balance of power in Europe, and is essential to the preservation of peace in the world."

"Half the wrong conclusions at which mankind arrive are reached by the abuse of metaphors, or by mistaking general resemblance or imaginary similarity for real identity. Thus, people compare an ancient monarchy with an old building, an old tree, or an old man, and because the building, tree, or man must, from the nature of things, crumble, or decay, or die, they imagine that the same thing holds good with a community, and that the same laws which govern inanimate matter, or vegetable or animal life, govern also nations and states."

"It is indeed remarkable how contradictory are the assertions which the partizans of Mehemet Ali are driven to have recourse to; for while at one time and for one purpose they represent him as the great champion of Mahommedan feeling, at another time, and for another purpose, they extol him as the subduer of Mahommedan prejudice, and as a man who has had energy enough to coerce that religious fanaticism which rendered the Mahommedans so overbearing and intolerable to the Christians in all the transactions and intercourse of life."

"I regret to learn that you are still not easy about your own affairs, but trust all will be speedily adjusted. You always allow me, dear Uncle, to speak frankly to you; you will, therefore, I hope, not be displeased if I venture to make a few observations on one or two parts of your letter. You say that the anger of the Belgians is principally directed against England. Now, I must that you are very unjust towards us, and (if I could) I might say even a little angry with you, dear Uncle. We only pressed Belgium for her own good, and not for ours. It may seem hard at first, but the time will come when you will see that we were right in urging you not to delay any longer the signature of the treaty."

"Your Lordship cannot too strongly impress upon the Portuguese Government that the conclusion of a Slave Trade Treaty is a matter which now concerns Portugal only but that the British Claims are a matter upon which Her Majesty's Government cannot admit any further delay. I have to remark to Your Lordship that as yet the new Portuguese Ministry differs from the preceding one in words only; that Her Majesty's Government expects deeds; and that evasion and delay cannot be accepted."

"The rivalship of European manufacturers is fast excluding our productions from the market of Europe, and we must unremittingly endeavour to find in other parts of the world new vents for the products of our industry. The world is large enough and the wants of the human race ample enough to afford a demand for all we can manufacture: but it is the business of government to open and secure the roads for the merchant."

"You have obtained the Cession of Hong Kong, a barren Island with hardly a House upon it... it seems obvious that Hong Kong will not be the Mart of Trade... it is impossible that you should continue to hold your appointment in China."

"They sally forth unawares on the villagers of the country; they put to death every man who cannot escape by flight; and they carry off into captivity the women and children. ("Shame, shame.") They carry away every head of cattle, every sheep, and every horse, and they burn what they cannot carry off—the crop on the ground and the corn in the granaries are consumed by the fire of the invaders. ("Shame.") What is the consequence? While in India our officers ride about unarmed and alone, amidst the wildest tribes of the wilderness, there is not a Frenchman in Africa who shows his face above a given spot from the sentry at his post, who does not fall a victim to the wild and justifiable retaliation of the Arab. (Hear, hear.) They professed to colonize Algeria, but they are only encamped in military posts; and while we in India have the feelings of the people with us, in Africa every native is opposed to the French, and every heart burns with the desire of vengeance. (Hear, hear.) I mention these things because it is right you should know them; they are an additional proof that even in this world Providence has decreed that injustice and violence shall meet with their appropriate punishment, and that justice and mercy shall also have their reward. (Cheers.)"

"He alluded to that grievance which was expressed by the demand for fixity of tenure. He held that it would be unjust for Parliament to interfere in the arrangements between the landlord and tenant. To do so, would be to establish a principle of confiscation—to interfere with the rights of property, the foundation of all human society—property which the poorest man by his own industry and exertions, might acquire, as well as the wealthy and powerful."

"Sir, a wise Government in its home policy considers the reasonable wants of the people; in its foreign policy, it is prepared to resist the unjust demands and the unreasonable views of foreign powers. The present Government inverts this method; it is all resistance at home, all concession abroad."

"[I]f this opium had been seized in the ordinary course of Chinese authority, as being a contraband article, brought into China against the law—if it had been seized by the Chinese authorities within Chinese jurisdiction, there would have been no claim on the finance or upon the power of this Government to demand compensation or redress from the Government of China. It was entirely owing to the manner in which the opium had been extorted, that the late Government had felt that an outrage upon British subjects had been committed, which not only authorised but rendered necessary measures of hostility, should such be required. It had been said that what the late Government demanded was satisfaction for the injured honour of the country, and that one of the ways in which satisfaction was to be given was payment for the opium so extorted."

"In addition to the demand for compensation to the holders of opium, the Government added another for payment of the debts of the insolvent Hong merchants, and also a third for the pay uncut of the expenses of the war. The last demand was certainly unusual in European warfare, but it was not unusual in Asiatic warfare; and under all circumstances, in order to make the Chinese sensible of the extent of the outrage they had committed, and that they might sufficiently feel the exercise of the power of Britain in vindication of their honour, it was thought expedient and proper to make them pay the expense of the war, in addition to compensating the injured parties."

"I will venture to say, that if all the other crimes which the human race has committed, from the creation down to the present day, were added together in one vast aggregate, they would scarcely equal, I am sure they could not exceed, the amount of guilt which has been incurred by mankind, in connexion with this diabolical Slave Trade. And is it not, then, the duty of every government, and of every nation on whom Providence has bestowed the means of putting an end to this crime, to employ those means to the greatest possible extent? And if there is any government and any nation upon whom that duty is more especially incumbent, is not that government the government of England, and are we not that nation? Political influence and naval power are the two great instruments by which the Slave Trade may be abolished; our political influence, if properly exerted, is great, our naval power is pre-eminent."

"Ministers, in fact, appear to shape their policy not with reference to the great interests of their own country, but from a consideration of the effect which their course may produce upon the position of Foreign Governments. It may very well be a desirable object, and one worthy of consideration, that a particular individual should continue in the administration of affairs in another country, but it is too much that from regard to that object, the interests of this country should be sacrificed, and that every demand of Foreign Powers should be acceded to...It seems to me that the system of purchasing temporary security by lasting sacrifices, and of placing the interests of Foreign Ministries above those of this country, is one that never can be worked out with advantage either to the honour of this country, or to that of the Administration which pursues such a course. Since the accession to office of the right hon. Gentleman opposite, no one can have failed to observe, that there has been a great diminution of British influence and consideration in every foreign country. Influence abroad is to be maintained only by the operation of one or other of two principles—hope and fear. We ought to teach the weaker Powers to hope that they will receive the support of this country in their time of danger. Powerful countries should be taught to fear that they will be resisted by England in any unjust acts either towards ourselves or towards those who are bound in ties of amity with us."

"[I]f anything were calculated to render permanent and secure our friendly relations with great neighbouring Powers, it was the placing ourselves in a position of security against any sudden or unforeseen attack. There was no complete security for friendly relations between different countries, except in a state of mutual defence."

"[I]f we arrived at that situation [when]...the one country was fully prepared for aggression, and the other wholly unprepared for events, the result must be either some very dreadful disaster or some deep humiliation to be sustained by the country so undefended."

"[I]f they were negotiating with a foreign country on a matter which might threaten war, it was so far from embarrassing the negotiation, that it would strengthen it, to place ourselves in a position to repel any sudden and unforeseen attack."

"Louis Philippe and Guizot have carried their point by boldness. Louis Philippe and Guizot, like practical and sagacious men, determined to knock us down at once, and make an apology afterwards if necessary to pacify us."

"Mr. Harney...says the object and result of my foreign policy has been to establish tyranny and despotism. There really is something amusing in the novelty; for, after I have been accused all over Europe of being the great instigator of revolution—(Laughter)—the friend and champion of all popular insurrections, the enemy of all constituted authorities—after I have been charged with disturbing the peace of Europe by giving encouragement to every revolutionary and anarchical set of men—(renewed laughter)—it is somewhat amusing to hear charges the very reverse made against me by my present opponent."

"I cannot make out in what respect our conduct with regard to China is to bear out the charge of contempt for liberty and love of despotism which Mr. Harney has imputed to us. He says that we tried to compel the Chinese to smoke opium. Why, that charge is much the same as if a man were to be accused of compelling the people of England to drink beer or spirits or wine, or anything else of which they are exceedingly fond."

"[T]hese Chinese authorities suddenly turned round upon the men who had been their partners in this smuggling trade, and...they took thirty or forty British merchants, along with the British Consul, and shut them up, and plainly told them they should be starved unless they delivered up their stocks of opium... Now, I should like to know what Cromwell would have said if twenty or thirty British subjects and an officer of the Commonwealth had been shut up in limbo, and told they were to be starved... I know what he would have done. He would have stood no nonsense. (Laughter.) This was what we did. We said "This won't do; this is no go, gentlemen of China. (A laugh.) You have extorted valuable property from British subjects by a threat of locking them up till they die of starvation. We call upon you to refund the value of what you have so improperly and illegally wrested from our subjects." They refused; force was employed; and we brought them to our terms. In this instance at least, our policy was not attended with any expense. We said to the Chinese, "You have behaved very ill; we have had to teach you better manners; it has cost us something to do it, but we will send our bill in, and you must pay our charges." That was done, and they have certainly profited by the lesson. ("Hear," and a laugh.) They have become free traders too. (Hear, hear.)"

"H.M.'s Govt. are deeply impressed with the conviction that it is wise for Sovereigns and their Governments to pursue in the administration of their affairs a system of progressive improvement; to apply remedies to such evils as upon examination they may find to exist; and to re-model from time to time the ancient Institutions of their Country, so as to render them more suitable to the gradual growth of Intelligence, and to the increasing diffusion of political Knowledge, and H.M. Gr. consider it to be an undeniable truth that if an independent Sovereign in the service of his deliberate judgement shall think fit to make within his Dominions such Improvements in the Laws and Institution of his country as he may think conducive to the welfare of his People, no other Govt. can have any right to attempt to restrain or to interfere with such an employment of one of the inherent attributes of independent Sovereignty."

"I hold with respect to alliances, that England is a Power sufficiently strong, sufficiently powerful, to steer her own course, and not to tie herself as an unnecessary appendage to the policy of any other Government. I hold that the real policy of England—apart from questions which involve her own particular interests, political or commercial—is to be the champion of justice and right; pursuing that course with moderation and prudence, not becoming the Quixote of the world, but giving the weight of her moral sanction and support wherever she thinks that justice is, and wherever she thinks that wrong has been done...I say that it is a narrow policy to suppose that this country or that is to be marked out as the eternal ally or the perpetual enemy of England. We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow. ... And if I might be allowed to express in one sentence the principle which I think ought to guide an English Minister, I would adopt the expression of Canning, and say that with every British Minister the interests of England ought to be the shibboleth of his policy."

"Prince Metternich thinks he is a conservative, in clinging obstinately to the status quo in Europe; we think ourselves conservative in preaching and advising everywhere concessions, reforms and improvements, where public opinion demands them; you on the contrary refuse them."

"What business is it of ours to ask whether the French nation thinks proper to be governed by a king, an emperor, a president, or a consul? Our object and our duty is to cement the closest ties of friendship between ourselves and our nearest neighbour... There is nothing, I am convinced, in the real interests of England and France which can stand in the way of the most cordial friendship between the two nations."

"I therefore fearlessly challenge the verdict which this House, as representing a political, a commercial, a constitutional country, is to give on the question now brought before it; whether the principles on which the foreign policy of Her Majesty's government has been conducted, and the sense of duty which has led us to think ourselves bound to afford protection to our fellow subjects abroad, are proper and fitting guides for those who are charged with the government of England; and whether, as the Roman, in days of old, held himself free from indignity when he could say Civis Romanus sum; so also a British subject, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England will protect him against injustice and wrong."

"It is only from England, and from the exertions of England, that any hope can be entertained of the extinction of the slave trade, and of the ultimate abolition of slavery throughout the world; because it is England alone that feels any deep and sincere interest in the matter. England now holds a proud position among the nations of the earth, and exercises a great influence upon the destinies of mankind. That influence is owing, in the first place, to our great wealth, to our unbounded resources, to our military and naval strength. But it is owing still more, if possible, to the moral dignity which marks the character and conduct of the British people...Those who desire to see the principles of liberty thrive and extend through the world, should cherish, with an almost religious veneration, the prosperity and greatness of England. So long as England shall ride preeminent on the ocean of human affairs, there can be none whose fortunes shall be so shipwrecked—there can be none whose condition shall be so desperate and forlorn—that they may not cast a look of hope towards the light that beams from hence; and though they may be beyond the reach of our power, our moral support and our sympathy shall cheer them in their adversity, and shall assist them to bear up, and to hold out, waiting for a better day."

"The Beer Shops licensed to have the Beer drunk on the Premises, are a Pest to the Community. They are Haunts of Thieves and Schools for Prostitutes. They demoralize the lower Classes. I wish you would turn your mind to consider Whether this Evil could not be abated. That Beer should be sold like anything Else, to be taken away by the Purchaser to be consumed at Home is most reasonable and the more People are enabled so to supply the labouring Classes the better, but the words “licensed to be drunk on the Premises” are by the common People interpreted as applicable to the Customers as well as to the Liquor, and well do they avail themselves of the License."

"The hon. Member for Manchester (Mr. Bright) asks, "What is our interest in this war?" and he also asked me to explain the meaning of the expression "the balance of power." ...[The] "Balance of power" means only this—that a number of weaker States may unite to prevent a stronger one from acquiring a power which should be dangerous to them, and which should overthrow their independence, their liberty, and their freedom of action. It is the doctrine of self-preservation. It is the doctrine of self-defence, with the simple qualification that it is combined with sagacity and with forethought, and an endeavour to prevent imminent danger before it comes thundering at your doors."

"...he thinks that peace is, of all things, the best, and that war is, of all things, the worst. Now, Sir, I happen to be of opinion that there are things for which peace may be advantageously sacrificed, and that there are calamities which a nation may endure which are far worse than war. This has been the opinion of men in all ages whose conduct has been admired by their contemporaries, and has obtained for them the approbation of posterity. The hon. Member, however, reduces everything to the question of pounds, shillings, and pence, and I verily believe that if this country were threatened with an immediate invasion likely to end in its conquest, the hon. Member would sit down, take a piece of paper, and would put on one side of the account the contributions which his Government would require from him for the defence of the liberty and independence of the country, and he would put on the other the probable contributions which the general of the invading army might levy upon Manchester, and if he found that, on balancing the account, it would be cheaper to be conquered than to be laid under contribution for defence, he would give his vote against going to war for the liberties and independence of the country, rather than bear his share in the expenditure which it would entail."

"Talk to me of the aristocracy of England! Why, look to that glorious charge of the cavalry at Balaklava—look to that charge, where the noblest and the wealthiest of the land rode foremost, followed by heroic men from the lowest classes of the community, each rivalling the other in bravery, neither the peer who led nor the trooper who followed being distinguished the one from the other. In that glorious band there were the sons of the gentry of England; leading were the noblest of the land, and following were the representatives of the people of this country."

"I noticed, I must confess, with great pain the tenor and tone of the speech of the hon. Member for the West Riding, because there pervaded the whole of it an anti-English feeling, an abnegation of all those ties which bind men to their country and to their fellow-countrymen, which I should hardly have expected from the lips of any Member of this House. Everything that was English was wrong, and everything that was hostile to England was right."

"Sir, I believe that if the House adopts this Motion...[t]hey will say, "Here is a Power that has been formerly great in arms, whose armies have gained victories in remote regions, whose fleets have floated triumphantly over every ocean... this people are now overcome by the love of gain. They fear the expenses and the efforts which may be necessary to protect their countrymen, and they abandon a large community of British subjects at the extreme end of the globe to a set of barbarians—a set of kidnapping, murdering, poisoning barbarians." I say foreign nations would feel that England has descended from that high station which hitherto she has occupied, at the beck of some of the basest, the meanest, and the most degraded beings in the civilized world."

"If those who voted against us had risen to power, what ought they have to have done as the logical and inevitable consequences of their vote? They asserted that our proceedings were unjustifiable. They were bound, therefore, in the event of their success, to have apologised to the Chinese barbarians for the wrongs we had done...they must have paid the rewards which had been given for the heads of our merchants, and the cost of the arsenic which had been used in poisoning our fellow-subjects at Hongkong. Gentlemen, I cannot envy the feelings of those men who could witness with calmness the heads of respectable British merchants on the walls of Canton, or the murders and assassinations and poisonings perpetrated on our fellow-countrymen abroad, and who, instead of feeling their blood boil with indignation at such proceedings, would have had us make an abject submission to the barbarians by whom these atrocities were committed."

"An insolent barbarian wielding authority at Canton had violated the British flag, broken the engagements of treaties, offered rewards for the heads of British subjects in that part of China, and planned their destruction by murder, assassination, and poisons."

"Young Ireland, the Catholic Party and its newspaper organs in Dublin are trying to do all the mischief they can. They are praising the mutineers, and calling upon the Irish to follow their example. I think it will be advisable to call out and embody five thousand more Militia, making twenty thousand in all, and it would be best to bring over to England all the Irish regiments belonging to the Catholic counties, and to send English regiments to Ireland. Some of the Northern Irish regiments would be well left in Ireland. They are chiefly Protestants, and would be delighted to put down the Croppys if they should rise."

"Carlisle is right in saying that there is no serious danger to be apprehended from Ireland, but what I want to prevent is any, even the slightest, outbreak, and this is only to be done by showing that we have in Ireland a sufficient Saxon force to make any movement on the part of the Celts perfectly hopeless, and sure to bring immediate destruction on those who take part in it. Any outbreak of any kind in Ireland would be magnified by our enemies and rivals, and would greatly weaken our political position in Europe."

"To punish the guilty adequately exceeds the power of any civilised man; for the atrocities which have been committed are such as to be imagined and perpetrated only by demons sallying forth from the lowest depths of hell. But punishment must be inflicted, not only in a spirit of vengeance, but in a spirit of security, in order that the example of punished crime may deter from a repetition of the offence, and in order to insure the safety of our countrymen and countrywomen in India for the future. He will have to spare the innocent, and it is most gratifying that while the guilty may be counted by thousands the innocent must be reckoned by millions."

"These Yankees are the most disagreeable Fellows to have to do with about any American question; they are on the Spot, strong, deeply interested in the matter, totally unscrupulous and dishonest and determined somehow or other to carry their Point; we are far away, weak from Distance, controlled by the Indifference of the nation as to the Question discussed, and by its strong commercial Interest in maintaining Peace with the United States... I have long felt inwardly convinced that the Anglo-Saxon race will in process of time become masters of the whole American Continent North and South... it is not for us to assist such a Consummation, but on the contrary we ought to delay it as long as possible."

"My dear John Russell, Till lately I had strong confidence in the fair intentions of Napoleon towards England, but of late I have begun to feel great distrust and to suspect that his formerly declared intention of avenging Waterloo has only lain dormant and has not died away. He seems to have thought that he ought to lay his foundation by beating with our aid or with our concurrence, or our neutrality first Russia and then Austria: and by dealing with them generously to make them his friends and in any subsequent quarrel with us."

"Our interests require that Egypt should remain what it is, an integral part of the Turkish empire. We do not want it or wish it for ourselves, any more than any rational man with an estate in the North of England and a residence in the South would have wished to possess the inns on the North Road."

"It is quite clear that if by sudden attack by an Enemy landed in strength our Dock-yards were to be destroyed our Maritime Power would for more than half a century be paralysed, and our Colonies, our commerce, and the Subsistence of a large Part of our Population would be at the Mercy of our Enemy, who would be sure to shew us no Mercy—we should be reduced to the Rank of a third Rate Power if no worse happened to us. That such a Landing is in the present State of Things possible must be manifest. No Naval Force of ours can effectually prevent it. ... One night is enough for the Passage to our Coast, and Twenty Thousand men might be landed at any Point before our Fleet knew that the Enemy was out of Harbour. There could be no security against the simultaneous Landing of 20,000 for Portsmouth 20,000 for Plymouth and 20,000 for Ireland our Troops would necessarily be scattered about the United Kingdom, and with Portsmouth and Plymouth as they now are those Two dock yards and all they contain would be entered and burnt before Twenty Thousand Men could be brought together to defend either of them. ... if these defensive works are necessary, it is manifest that they ought to be made with the least possible delay; to spread their Completion over 20 or 30 years would be Folly unless we could come to an agreement with a chivalrous Antagonist, not to molest us till we could inform him we were quite ready to repel his attack—we are told that these works might, if money were forthcoming be finished possibly in three at latest in four years. Long enough this to be kept in a State of imperfect Defence."

"I must make a protest against the sort of exaggerations in which the noble Lord has indulged. He has described the railway launching 2,000 or 3,000 ruffians upon some quiet neighbourhood in a manner that might lead one to imagine the train conveyed a set of banditti to plunder, rack, and ravage the country, murder the people, burn the houses, and commit every sort of atrocity...they may conceive it to be a very harmless pursuit...Some people look upon it as an exhibition of manly courage, characteristic of the people of this country. I saw the other day a long extract from a French newspaper describing this fight as a type of the national character for endurance, patience under suffering of indomitable perseverance, in determined effort, and holding it up as a specimen of the manly and admirable qualities of the British race...I do not perceive why any number of persons, say 1,000 if you please, who assemble to witness a prize fight, are in their own persons more guilty of a breach of the peace than an equal number of persons who assemble to witness a balloon ascent. There they stand; there is no breach of the peace; they go to see a sight, and when that sight is over they return, and no injury is done to any one. They only stand or sit on the grass to witness the performance, and as to the danger to those who perform themselves, I imagine the danger to life in the case of those who go up in balloons is certainly greater than that of two combatants who merely hit each other as hard as they can, but inflict no permanent injury upon each other."

"To fortify London by works is impossible—London must be defended by an army in the Field, and by one or more Battles,—one I trust would be sufficient; but for this Purpose we must be able to concentrate in the Field the largest possible Military Force. In order to do so we must have the means of defending our Naval arsenals with the smallest possible Military Force, and this can be accomplished only by Fortifications which enable a small Force to resist a larger one. Thence it is demonstrable that to fortify our Dockyards is to assist the Defence of London. As to Time we have no time to lose. I deeply regret that various circumstances have so long delayed proposing the Measure to Parliament, but it would be a Breach of our public Duty to put it off to another year. There may be some Persons in the House of Commons with peculiar notions on things in General and with very imperfect notions as to our National Interest who will object to the proposed Measures, but I cannot bring myself to believe that the Majority of the present House of Commons, or the House of Commons that would be elected on an appeal on this Question to the People of the Country would refuse to sanction Measures so indispensably necessary."

"I am heartily glad that Elgin and Grant determined to burn down the Summer Palace and that "the blackness of ashes shall mark where it stood"… It was absolutely necessary to stamp by some such permanent record our indignation at the treachery and brutality of these Tartars, for Chinese they are not."

"I have watched the French Emperor narrowly, and have studied his character and conduct. You may rely upon it that, at the bottom of his heart, there rankles a deep and inextinguishable desire to humble and punish England, and to avenge, if he can, the many humiliations — political, naval and military — which, since the beginning of this century, England has by herself and her allies inflicted upon France. He has sufficiently organised his military means; he is now stealthily but steadily organising his naval means; and when all is ready, the overture will be played, the curtain will draw up, and we shall have a very disagreeable melodrama."

"It is in the highest degree likely that the North will not be able to subdue the south, and it is no doubt certain that if the Southern union is established as an independent state it would afford a valuable and extensive market for British manufactures but the operations of the war have as yet been too indecisive to warrant an acknowledgement of the southern union."

"Great Britain is in a better state than at any former time to inflict a severe blow upon and to read a lesson to the United States which will not soon be forgotten."

"It is difficult not to come to the conclusion that the rabid hatred of England which animates the exiled Irishmen who direct almost all the Northern newspapers, will so excite the masses as to make it impossible for Lincoln and Seward to grant our demands; and we must therefore look forward to war as the probable result."

"It would be very delightful if your Utopia could be realized and if the nations of the earth would think of nothing but peace and commerce, and would give up quarrelling and fighting altogether. But unfortunately man is a fighting and quarrelling animal; and that this is human nature is proved by the fact that republics, where the masses govern are far more quarrelsome, and more addicted to fighting, than monarchies, which are governed by comparatively few persons."

"There is no doubt that all nations are aggressive; it is the nature of man. There start up from time to time between countries antagonistic passions and questions of conflicting interest, which, if not properly dealt with, would terminate in the explosion of war. Now, if one country is led to think that another country, with which such questions might arise, is from fear disposed on every occasion tamely to submit to any amount of indignity, that is an encouragement to hostile conduct and to extreme proceedings which lead to conflict. It may be depended on that there is no better security for peace between nations than the conviction that each must respect the other, that each is capable of defending itself, and that no insult or injury committed by the one against the other would pass unresented."

"As to the American [Civil] War it has manifestly ceased to have any attainable object as far as the Northerns are concerned, except to get rid of some more thousand troublesome Irish and Germans. It must be owned, however, that the Anglo-Saxon race on both sides have shown courage and endurance highly honourable to their stock."

"We see in the East some of the evils which are incident to arbitrary sway. We witness in the West the widespread misery and desolation which are sometimes created by democratic and Republican institutions. We enjoy a happy medium between the extremes of these two forms of Government. Our institutions not only confer happiness and tranquillity upon the people of these realms, but enable them to enjoy the most perfect freedom of thought, of speech, of writing, and of action, unawed and uncontrolled either by the edicts of despotic authority, or by the Lynch law of an ungovernable mob."

"The King of Prussia seems to have made his models of action Charles the first of England and Charles the Tenth of France and Bismarck is an humble Imitator of the Ministers of those Two unfortunate Sovereigns. I hope the King's fate will not be like theirs. The King...is quite wrong in attempting unconstitutionally to force his opinions upon his Parliament. He ought to give way and he will be compelled to give way."

"[Richard Cobden and John Bright] have run a muck against everything that the British Nation respects and values – Crown, Aristocracy, Established Church, Nobility, Gentry and Landowners. They have laboured incessantly to set class against class, and the Poor against the rich."

"Nothing is so difficult to change as the traditional habits of a free people in regard to such things. Such changes may be easily made in despotic countries like Russia, or in countries where notwithstanding theoretical freedom the government and the police are all powerful as in France... Can you expect that the people of the United Kingdom will cast aside all the names of space and weight and capacity which they learnt from their infancy and all of a sudden adopt an unmeaning jargon of barbarous words representing ideas and things new to their minds. It seems to me to be a dream of pedantic theorists... I see no use however in attempting to Frenchify the English nation, and you may be quite sure that the English nation will not consent to be Frenchified. There are many conceited men who think that they have given an unanswerable argument in favour of any measure they may propose by merely saying that it has been adopted by the French. I own that I am not of that school, and I think the French have much to gain by imitating us than we have to gain by imitating them. The fact is there are a certain set of very vain men like Ewart and Cobden who not finding in things as they are here, the prominence of position to which they aspire, think that they gain a step by oversetting any of our arrangements great or small and by holding up some foreign country as an object of imitation."

"I have read your speech and I must frankly say, with much regret as there is little in it that I can agree with, and much from which I differ. You lay down broadly the Doctrine of Universal Suffrage which I can never accept. I intirely deny that every sane and not disqualified man has a moral right to a vote—I use that Expression instead of “the Pale of the Constitution”, because I hold that all who enjoy the Security and civil Rights which the Constitution provides are within its Pale—What every Man and Woman too have a Right to, is to be well governed and under just Laws, and they who propose a change ought to shew that the present organization does not accomplish those objects...[Your speech] was more like the Sort of Speech with which Bright would have introduced the Reform Bill which he would like to propose than the Sort of Speech which might have been expected from the Treasury bench in the present State of Things. Your Speech may win Lancashire for you, though that is doubtful but I fear it will tend to lose England for you. It is to be regretted that you should, as you stated, have taken the opportunity of your receiving a Deputation of working men, to exhort them to set on Foot an Agitation for Parliamentary Reform—The Function of a Government is to calm rather than to excite Agitation."

"Mr. Gladstone's Doctrine which the Observer praised that every sane man has a moral Right to vote goes straight to universal suffrage which not even the most vehement Reformer has hitherto advocated. Moreover if every sane Man has that Right why does it not also belong to every sane woman Who is equally affected by Legislation and Taxation. The Truth is that a vote is not a Right but a Trust. All the Nation cannot by Possibility be brought together to vote and therefore a Selected few are appointed by Law to perform this Function for the Rest and the Publicity attached to the Performance of this Trust is a Security that it will be responsibly performed."

"I am sure every Englishman who has a heart in his breast and a feeling of justice in his mind, sympathizes with those unfortunate Danes (cheers), and wishes that this country could have been able to draw the sword successfully in their defence (continued cheers); but I am satisfied that those who reflect on the season of the year when that war broke out, on the means which this country could have applied for deciding in one sense that issue, I am satisfied that those who make these reflections will think that we acted wisely in not embarking in that dispute. (Cheers.) To have sent a fleet in midwinter to the Baltic every sailor would tell you was an impossibility, but if it could have gone it would have been attended by no effectual result. Ships sailing on the sea cannot stop armies on land, and to have attempted to stop the progress of an army by sending a fleet to the Baltic would have been attempting to do that which it was not possible to accomplish. (Hear, hear.) If England could have sent an army, and although we all know how admirable that army is on the peace establishment, we must acknowledge that we have no means of sending out a force at all equal to cope with the 300,000 or 400,000 men whom the 30,000,000 or 40,000,000 of Germany could have pitted against us, and that such an attempt would only have insured a disgraceful discomfiture—not to the army, indeed, but to the Government which sent out an inferior force and expected it to cope successfully with a force so vastly superior. (Cheers.) … we did not think that the Danish cause would be considered as sufficiently British, and as sufficiently bearing on the interests and the security and the honour of England, as to make it justifiable to ask the country to make those exertions which such a war would render necessary."

"As to the notion that the Brazilian nation see the criminality of slave trade and have for ever abjured it such a notion is too childish for a grown man really to entertain, however it may suit the Brazilians to endeavour to make it accepted. The plain truth is that the Portuguese are of all European nations the lowest in the moral state and the Brazilians are degenerate Portuguese, demoralized by slavery and slave trade, and all the degrading and corrupting influences connected with both... I have laboured indefatigably all the time I was at the Foreign Office to put an end to the slave trade, and though not with entire at all events with some considerable success and nothing shall induce me to load my conscience with the guilt of having been a party to promoting its revival. I am afraid Bright has been at you upon these Brazilian matters. He has always professed great horror of slave trade and has invariably opposed the employment of any and every means by which it could be made to cease."

"Mackieson gave me the other day a buffalo hide whip from Africa called in those regions a Peace Maker and used as such in the households of chieftains. Our Peace Makers are our Armstrongs and Whitworths and our engineers."

"If I have in any Degree been fortunate enough to have obtained some share of the Good Will and Confidence of my Fellow-Countrymen, it has been because I have rightly understood the Feelings and Opinions of the Nation, and because they think that I have...endeavoured to maintain the Dignity and to uphold the Interests of the country abroad, and to provide for its security at home."

"I beg to propose to you that toast which is the first to which honour is done in every society of Englishmen, I mean "the Health of Her Majesty the Queen" — a toast which embodies the expression of that which is the deepest and warmest feeling of every Englishman... It could not be expected that man would pursue with diligence and success the pursuits of industry if he were not assured that he would reap in security the fruits which that industry might produce, and I am happy to say that our Army, our Navy, our Militia, and our Volunteers do afford to the people of these realms that security which human arrangements can provide for them. We are happily now at peace with all foreign Powers; but the continuance of that peace is not likely to be less certain when it is known to all foreign nations that the Army, the Navy, the Militia, and the Volunteers of England are in a state of perfect efficiency, and ready if called upon to defend the interests and to maintain the honour and dignity of their country against all who might think fit to assail them."

"As to tenant-right, I may be allowed to say that I think it is equivalent to landlords' wrong."

"Gladstone will soon have it all his own way; and, whenever he gets my place, we shall have strange doings...He is a dangerous man, keep him in Oxford, and he is partially muzzled; but send him elsewhere, and he will run wild."

"Lord Palmerston: Then you did not vote for me, friend Rowcliffe; you preferred voting for a Tory. William Rowcliffe: I did not vote for you, my Lord, for if I had, I should have voted for a Tory."

"Russia will in due time become a power almost as great as the old Roman Empire. She can become mistress of all Asia, except British India, whenever she chooses to take it; and when enlightened arrangements shall have made her revenue proportioned to her territory, and railways shall have abridged distances her command of men will become enormous, her pecuniary means gigantic, and her power of transporting armies over great distances most formidable. Germany ought to be strong in order to resist Russian aggression, and a strong Prussia is essential to German strength."

"The American assault on Ireland under the name of Fenianism may be now held to have failed, but the snake is only scotched and not killed. It is far from impossible that the American conspirators may try and obtain in our North American provinces compensation for their defeat in Ireland."

"Only three people," said Palmerston, "have ever really understood the Schleswig-Holstein business—the Prince Consort, who is dead—a German professor, who has gone mad—and I, who have forgotten all about it."

"That's Article 98; now go on to the next."

"Die, my dear doctor! That's the last thing I shall do!"

"When we were at war with Russia, and when the nation, after trying statesman after statesman, continued in the distressing consciousness that the administration lacked vigour, the man who, for a quarter of a century, had been checkmating the policy of Russia was naturally called for. In no spirit of confidence or enthusiasm,—feeling clearly that others had failed, but by no means certain that the right man was yet discovered,—England said, ‘Try Palmerston.’ It was on the 8th of February, 1855, that the Earl of Derby withdrew, and that he took the helm... The country looked on in hope, beginning to breathe more freely...the practical instinct of the nation gradually decided that Palmerston was the man to whom the business of the war could be committed, and in whose hands the name of England was safe."

"We learned to call him Old Pam, and to love him better than any Prime Minister was ever loved throughout the three kingdoms. All parties in the House took to him. It was pleasant to sit under his parliamentary government, and though there were Liberals more liberal than he, and Conservatives more conservative, the majority both of Liberals and Conservatives secretly preferred him to their special chiefs... Perhaps no single word goes so far in the description of Lord Palmerston as the word ‘manly.’ ... In every respect Lord Palmerston was masculine, not feminine... Lord Palmerston was at all points a man. No sentimental egotism, no moral irritability, no sweet feminine cant about him. A genial stoicism,—not the stoicism of the cynic,—an inestimable faculty of taking the good and leaving the bad alone, an invincible serenity and lightness and brightness of soul, distinguished him."

"In 1864, when Austria and Prussia attacked Denmark, Britain remained neutral. This was due to Queen Victoria, who overruled Lord Palmerston, although that sharp-sighted statesman pointed out that Prussia wanted Kiel as a naval base. Thus we gave Germany her Kiel Canal."

"He is to the middle classes what Feargus O'Connor was to the working classes."

"Then you know what to avoid. Do the exact opposite of what he did. His administration at the Foreign Office was one long crime."

"When I went to Harrow in 1797, the late Lord Palmerston was reckoned the best-tempered and most plucky boy in the school, as well as a young man of great promise. We were in the same house, which was Dr. Bromley's, by whom we were often called when idle "young men of wit and pleasure." The late Lord De Mauley...and myself, were fags to Althorp, Duncannon, and Temple, who messed together; and the latter was by far the most merciful and indulgent. I can remember well Temple fighting "behind school" a great boy called Salisbury, twice his size, and he would not give in, but was brought home with black eyes and a bloody nose, and Mother Bromley taking care of him."

"Even if England still continues to increase in civilization and opulence, she may yet, as other stronger states also rapidly augment, perhaps not long retain her present commanding position in the world; and it may be that in future ages the name of Palmerston will be synonymous with her greatest glory. From one generation of Englishman to another, the saying will be handed down: We are all proud of him."

"In every post alike he showed the qualities that Englishmen love—pluck, good-humour, unflinching care for England's greatness, untiring zeal in the service of the State. His unexhausted, apparently inexhaustible spirits, his splendid physique, his untiring activity of mind and body, seemed proof against the inroads of old age."

"I have heard analogous stories told of the brusqueness or indifference of leaders in more recent times. Almost the only Parliamentary leader against whom such charges were never brought were Melbourne and Palmerston. Both were light-hearted and rather cynical men of the world, and Palmerston's long ascendency was due quite as much to his good humour and jokes and banter as it was to more intellectual qualities."

"Right, in his eyes, was right; and if he insisted upon it when a formidable enemy might be provoked, he treated with becoming scorn the argument that we should deal more gently with an inferior delinquent. "What?" he used to say; "we are to tax our people for the purpose of giving them a strong Government, and then we are not to maintain the rights of our people because their Government is strong. The weaker a Government is, the more inexcusable becomes its insolence or injustice.""

"As we walked along I could gauge the popularity of Lord Palmerston. The moment he came in sight, throughout the whole building, men and women, young and old, at once were struck as by an electric shock. “Lord Palmerston! Here is Lord Palmerston! Bravo! Hurrah! Lord Palmerston for ever!” And so it went on through the whole building. One voice: “I wish you may be Minister for the next twenty years”."

"He is the Tory chief of a Radical Cabinet."

"He said he had had two great objects always before him in life—one the suppression of the slave trade, the other to put England in a state of defence."

"A Frenchman, thinking to be highly complimentary, said to Palmerston: "If I were not a Frenchman, I should wish to be an Englishman"; to which Pam coolly replied: "If I were not an Englishman, I should wish to be an Englishman.""

"Palmerston had two admirable qualities. He had an intense love of Constitutional freedom everywhere; and he had a profound hatred of negro slavery... I should not ascribe to him the overpowering conscientiousness which I ascribe to Peel."

"Never...did I meet with any one that could tell a story with greater effect than the late Lord Palmerston."

"A member of Lord Palmerston's Cabinet gave me an amusing description of their proceedings. At the beginning of the session, and after each holiday, Mr. Gladstone used to come in charged to the muzzle with all sorts of schemes of all sorts of reforms which were absolutely necessary in his opinion to be immediately undertaken. Lord Palmerston used to look fixedly at the paper before him, saying nothing until there was a lull in Gladstone's outpouring. He then rapped the table and said cheerfully, “Now, my lords and gentlemen, let us go to business.”"

"Nothing will induce her Majesty to have Palmerston... Her dislike of him is, in fact, of very long standing, and partly on moral and partly on political grounds. There are old offences, when he was at the Foreign Office, which sunk deep in her mind, and besides this the recollection of his conduct before her marriage, when in her own palace he made an attempt on the person of one of her ladies, which she very justly resented as an outrage to herself. Palmerston, always enterprising and audacious with women, took a fancy to Mrs. Brand (now Lady Dacre) and at Windsor Castle where she was in waiting, and he was a guest, he marched into her room one night. His tender temerity met with an invincible resistance. The lady did not conceal her attempt, and it came to the Queen's ears. Her indignation was somehow pacified by Melbourne, then all-powerful, and who on every account would have abhorred an esclandre in which his colleague and brother-in-law would have so discreditably figured. Palmerston got out of the scrape with his usual luck, but the Queen has never forgotten and will never forgive it."

"I cannot find any fault with Lord Palmerston's bearing on that July day [in 1847]. With all his natural tendency to caustic criticism, he was courteous and fair... Lord Palmerston was an aristocrat; no doubt about that. But he was genial, frank, and generous. Moreover he abhorred cant in every form... Coming over to England in 1878, I was told the following incident of Lord Palmerston, then dead some 13 years. It happened that some of the working class Radicals of the time were in the lobby of "the House" with the view of soliciting subscriptions from Liberal members for some unfortunate of the "advanced" corps, stricken down by disease, and suffering from that other and too common ill—impecuniosity; when the Premier was seen approaching. Said one of the party—"Here comes Pam, let us try him." The idea was pooh-pooh'd, but it was carried out by the suggestor. Lord Palmerston patiently listened to the story and responded with his usual kindly liberality, accompanying the gift by some pleasantry as was his wont. He had faced toward the chamber of the Commons, when suddenly turning back, he enquired, "Can you tell me what has become of an old Chartist acquaintance of mine, Mr. George Julian Harney?" The person addressed could not tell, but an older man of the group said he believed Julian Harney was in America. Lord Palmerston rejoined, "Well, I wish him good fortune: he gave me a dressing down at Tiverton some years ago, and I have not heard of him since; but I hope he is doing well.""

"Towards the end of his life, Lord Palmerston was invited to Bradford to lay the foundation-stone of the new Exchange. On that occasion, the working men were desirous of presenting an address to him, upon their wish for an extension of the franchise. Mr. Ripley, chairman of the Exchange Committee, utterly ignorant of Lord Palmerston's nature, refused to permit any approach to him. The worst enemy of Lord Palmerston could not have done him a worse service. Nothing would have pleased him better than to have met a working-class deputation. His personal heartiness, his invincible temper, his humour and ready wit would have captivated the working men, and sent them away enthusiastic, although without anything to be enthusiastic about."

"Wherever there is an absolute tyranny in Europe, his Lordship is looked upon with hatred or mistrust, and wherever there is a desire for constitutional liberty, repressed by bayonets or threatened by irresponsible autocrats, there has his Lordship admirers and friends."

"Palmerston, rex and autocrat, is, for a Minister finding himself in such fortunate circumstances, far too irritable and violent."

"[David Lloyd George said] he would see that an enormous amount of equipment & ammunition were supplied to the Abyssinians, which would enable them to put up a good fight. He says he feels sure that that is what Palmerston would have done."

"He loved his country and his country loved him. He lived for her honour, and she will cherish his memory."

"It was the singular position of Lord Palmerston that explained the qualified support given to him by some Conservatives. They found it hard to take part against a gay old Tory of the older school, disguising himself as a “Liberal,” and hoaxing the Reform Club. As a matter of sentiment, many Conservatives refused to deal roughly with one whom they regarded as a sort of Parliamentary grandpapa."

"As a Minister, although I often differed from him, I looked upon him as one of our greatest, especially in his knowledge of foreigners and their character. He was clear headed, always knew what he wanted, and was determined to carry it out, with great moral and physical courage. We shall be long ere we see his like again. He was English to the backbone."

"Although a septuagenarian, and since 1807 occupying the public stage almost without interruption, he contrives to remain a novelty, and to evoke all the hopes that used to centre on an untried and promising youth. With one foot in the grave, he is supposed not yet to have begun his true career. If he were to die tomorrow, all England would be surprised to learn that he had been a Secretary of State half this century. If not a good statesman of all work, he is at least a good actor of all work. He succeeds in the comic as in the heroic—in pathos as in familiarity—in tragedy as in farce; although the latter may be more congenial to his feelings. He is not a first-class orator, but an accomplished debater. Possessed of a wonderful memory, of great experience, of consummate tact, of never-failing presence of mind, of gentlemanlike versatility, of the most minute knowledge of Parliamentary tricks, intrigues, parties, and men, he handles difficult cases in an admirable manner and with a pleasant volatility, sticking to the prejudices and susceptibilities of his public, secured from any surprise by his cynical impudence, from any self-confession by his selfish dexterity, from running into a passion by his profound frivolity, his perfect indifference, and his aristocratic contempt. Being an exceedingly happy joker, he ingratiates himself with everybody. Never losing his temper, he imposes on an impassioned antagonist. When unable to master a subject, he knows how to play with it. If wanting in general views, he is always ready to weave a web of elegant generalities. Endowed with a restless and indefatigable spirit, he abhors inactivity and pines for agitation, if not for action. A country like England allows him, of course, to busy himself in every corner of the earth."

"I would walk twenty miles to see him [Palmerston] hanged especially if Thiers were to be strung up with him."

"Englishmen revered Gladstone, but they were never quite sure that they understood him; Palmerston they could pat on the back as one of themselves... His combativeness, his robust, if tactless, patriotism, his capacity for getting into scrapes and his equal capacity for getting out of them, his love of a "scrap," his freedom from malice, his gift for "keeping his end up" —all these things the average Englishman could understand and appreciate, for he saw in them a reflection of his own character."

"Tho' he made a joke when asked to do the right thing, he always did it. No one else will be able to carry the things thro' the Cabinet as he did. I shall lose a powerful protector... He was much more in earnest than he appeared. He did not do himself justice."

"Warmed by the instincts of a knightly heart, That roused at once if insult touched the realm, He spurned each Statecraft, each deceiving art, And met his foes, no vizor to his helm. This proved his worth; hereafter be our boast: Who hated Britons hated him the most."

"[Palmerston usually had some answer] ready for me; but one time I regularly shut him up. It was just upon the passing of the Poor Law Act which made legal the separation of man and wife after the age of sixty. I remember that day very well. There was Lady Palmerston there with a lot of ladies looking out of one window of the Three Tuns, all dressed out in ribbons and colours, cheering and laughing in high glee. His Lordship was at the other window speaking to the crowd and when he was going to get rid of this subject of the Poor Law, I ups and says: "You ought to have consulted Lady Palmerston before passing that there Act. How would you and her like to be separated after you was sixty years of age? Are your feelings any finer than those of the poor people you've been legislating for?" His Lordship pretended not to hear that, but I think he did, and so did Lady Palmerston too. That's what I call bringing it home to them."

"I can answer for my noble friend that he will act, not as Minister of Austria, or of Russia, or of France, or of any other country—but as the Minister of England."

"[H]is heart always beat for the honour of England."

"Lord Palmerston is generally regarded as the type of an astute and moderate leader."

"Lord Palmerston is a little too much inclined to consider himself the arbiter of the destinies of Europe. For our part, we are not in the least disposed to allow him to play, in our own affairs, the role of Providence... I must frankly confess that we are tired of his eternal insinuations, of his tone now protective and pedantic, now insulting, but always unbecoming, and we have decided that we shall no longer tolerate it. Lord Palmerston remarked one day to Baron Koller that if we wanted war, we should have it; and I told him that if he wants it he shall have it. I do not know whether Lord Palmerston applies to himself the phrase of Louis XIV, and thinks that ‘l'Angleterre c'est lui’."

"P.'s popularity is wonderful—strange to say, the whole turns on his name. There seems to be no measure, no principle, no cry, to influence men's minds and determine elections; it is simply, 'Were you, or were you not? are you, or are you not, for Palmerston?'"

"But we are afraid of our shadows. I sometimes long for a ruffian like Palmerston or any man who would be more than a string of platitudes and apologies."

"Lord Palmerston is certainly one of the most able, if not the most able, men of business whom I have met in my career... One feature in his character dissipates all these advantages, and prevents him, in my opinion, from ranking as a real statesman. He feels passionately about public affairs, and to the point of sacrificing the most important interests to his resentments. Nearly every political question resolves itself into a personal question in his eyes, and in appearing to defend the interests of his country, it is really the interests of his hate and vengeance that he satisfies."

"Palmerston was the hero of England because he deserved to be. As a European statesman, his objects, though he would have hated to confess it, were the same as Metternich's—the preservation of Peace and Order; but he did not confuse peace with petrification or order with death. He regarded with as much apprehension any extension of French power and was as strongly opposed to revolution, both in itself and because it opened the door to French ambition. But he differed violently and fundamentally as to the means by which Peace and Order were to be preserved. His method was the method of compromise—to grant popular demands while they were moderate and tentative, so as not to be compelled to grant much more extreme demands later; like the soft answer that turneth away wrath, a constitution, he believed, would turn away revolution. For although he regarded revolutionaries as conspirators, he did not regard revolutions as merely conspiracies: discontent seemed to him to show that something was wrong, and it appeared to him more important to put right what was wrong than to suppress the writings of Mazzini."

"It is difficult to think of a Foreign Secretary with a more successful record."

"With his gaiety of spirit and his easygoing morals, he hated tyranny and oppression wherever they occurred... With his dyed whiskers and his red face, Palmerston exemplified British self-confidence and bounce... He was simply an individual of strong personality – resolute, self-confident and with great powers of physical endurance."

"[T]he most English minister that ever governed England."

"He had no reason to be a friend to P. by whom He had been worsted, but that that did not prevent him from regarding him as the first Statesman of this age and perhaps of any other."

"He was one of the earliest and most constant enemies of the Slave Trade; he was a staunch friend of Roman Catholic Emancipation; he abandoned the ground taken up by Canning in advocating the Reform Bill; he was a Freetrader long before Sir Robert Peel became a convert. Above all, he was a steadfast and devoted partisan of constitutional liberty in every part of the Continent."

"The secret and source of his great popularity was his boundless sympathy with all classes of his countrymen... Englishmen were proud of him, not so much because he bearded foreign despots in his prime, or exhibited marvellous physical activity in his old age, as because they believed him to be a stout-hearted and benevolent statesman of the good old English stock... The name of Lord Palmerston, once the terror of the Continent, will long be connected in the minds of Englishmen with an epoch of unbroken peace and unparalleled prosperity."

"Lord Palmerston’s fear was that a weak or disruptive union of Belgium and the Netherlands would eventually invite French interference. French resurgence was his primary fear and its prevention the cornerstone of his foreign policy."

"Palmerston always claimed that his greatest achievement was the creation of Belgium."

"Palmerston, the most feared, the most hated and the most admired statesman in Europe…"

"[The NHS is] a great national blessing enabling people to live longer and happier lives."

"Perhaps there is at work here a process, apparent in many situations but imperfectly understood, by which problems reproduce themselves from generation to generation. If I refer to this as a cycle of deprivation."

"It was only in April 1974 that I was converted to Conservatism. (I had thought I was a Conservative but I now see that I was not really one at all.)"

"The question we must all ask ourselves is how Mr. Benn was able to come within striking distance of the very heart of our economic life in the first place... an important part of the answer must be that our industry, economic life and society have been so debilitated by 30 years of Socialistic fashions that their very weakness tempts further inroads. The path to Benn is paved with 30 years of interventions: 30 years of good intentions: 30 years of disappointments. These have led the collectivists to say that we are failing only because we are taking half measures. The reality is that for 30 years the private sector of our economy has been forced to work with one hand tied behind its back by government and unions. Socialist measures and Socialist legacies have weakened free enterprise."

"We are now more Socialist in many ways than any other developed country outside the Communist bloc—in the size of the public sector, the range of controls and the telescoping of net income. And what is the result? Compare our position today with that of our neighbours in north west Europe—Germany, Sweden, Holland, France. They are no more talented than we are. Yet, compared with them, we have the longest working hours, the lowest pay and the lowest production per head. We have the highest taxes and the lowest investment. We have the least prosperity, the most poor and the lowest pensions. We have the largest nationalized sector and the worst labour troubles."

"There is in this country an even more insidious attack on the law than the crime we are experiencing—as no doubt there is in every country—and that is the pervasive attack upon the free society. Many separate and distinct trends are being experienced, some from outside, some from within. There are armed groups, some with specific purposes, some with apocalytic purposes. A wide range of political forces, using anything from subversion to ordinary lobbying, seek to swing our society away from freedom. Violence is condoned and is very near the surface. The far Left with totalitarian purpose is widely active in factories, schools, universities and communications. There are deliberate destroyers at large pursuing various ideologies to seek to provoke and discredit the police in order to advance their aim of eroding our liberties. These extreme movements can mobilise shifting but substantial support from the naive, and can, and do, exploit every sort of resentment, frustration and grievance."

"If we are to retain the freedom of our society, we in this House must try to understand the many forces at work, the excessive permissiveness in some schools which has led to lack of self-discipline, the attitudes and the management at some secondary schools, the deliberate subversion that goes on at some schools, the exploitation and glamorisation of violence in many films and on television, and the licensed obscenities permitted, very wrongly, some years ago by the BBC. I am reminded of the poignant words of Caliban to Prospero: "You taught me language and my profit on't is I know how to curse." That seems, alas, appropriate to some of our school children. Behind all these manifestations there is a mindless fashion for revolution."

"The totalitarian antics of the far left, if not firmly handled by the Government of the day, produce a reaction in the far Right. I am a member of a minority with every reason to abominate the attitudes of the National Front. But I warn the House that if the excesses of the far Left are not curbed—of course, within the rule of law—we fuel the National Front; and the tragedy of that movement is that it contains not only some very nasty people but also some frustrated decent people, too, many of them trade unionists who see the far Left in action every day."

"It was not long ago that we thought utopia was within reach... What has happened to all this optimism? Has it really crumbled under the weight of rising crime, social decay and the decline of traditional values? Have we really become a nation of hooligans and vandals, bullies and child-batterers, criminals and inadequates?"

"Rousseau's educational theories had persuaded teachers] to dispense with the structured systems of learning which have been so successful in the past. [The result is] the belief, taught by Mr Roy Jenkins, that a permissive is a civilised society... A facile rhetoric of total liberty and of costless, superficial universal protest has really been a cover for irresponsibility. Our loud talk about the community overlies the fact that we have no community. We talk about neighbourhoods and all too often we have no neighbours. We go on about the home when we only have dwelling places containing television sets. It is the absence of a frame of rules and community, place and belonging, responsibility and neighbourliness that makes it possible for people to be more lonely than in any previous stage in our history. Vast factories, huge schools, sprawling estates, sky-scraping apartment blocks; all these work against our community and our common involvement one with another."

"There is moreover a commercial exploitation of brutality in print and in film which further debases the moral climate. And how is it that a generation that rejects the exploitation of man by man and promises the liberation of women can accept the exploitation of women by pornography? The left, usually so opposed to profitable commerce in trades beneficial to the public, systematically defends the blatant commercialism of the pornographic industry."

"The old virtues of patriotism and national pride have been denigrated in the name of internationalism, love of all our fellow-men. But no one can love mankind if he does not love his own countrymen. It was the radical Socialist writer and patriot, the late George Orwell, who described the left-wing intellectuals as men motivated primarily by hatred of their own country. Socialists who spoke most about brotherhood of man could not bear their fellow-Englishmen, he complained. Their well-orchestrated sneers from their strongpoint in the educational system and media have weakened the national will to transmit to future generations those values, standards and aspirations which made England admired the world over."

"The balance of our population, our human stock is threatened. A recent article in Poverty, published by the Child Poverty Action Group, showed that a high and rising proportion of children are being born to mothers least fitted to bring children into the world and to bring them up. They are born to mothers who were first pregnant in adolescence in socio-economic classes IV and V. Many of these girls are unmarried, many are deserted or divorced or soon will be. Some are of low intelligence, most of low educational attainment. They are unlikely to be able to give children the stable emotional background, the consistent combination of love and firmness which are more important than riches. They are producing problem children, the future unmarried mothers, delinquents, denizens of our borstals, sub-normal educational establishments, prisons, hostels for drifters. Yet these mothers, the under-twenties in many cases, single parents, from classes 4 and 5, are now producing a third of all births. A high proportion of these births are a tragedy for the mother, the child and for us. Yet what shall we do? If we do nothing, the nation moves towards degeneration, however much resources we pour into preventative work and the over-burdened educational system. It is all the more serious when we think of the loss of people with talent and initiative through emigration as our semi-socialism deprives them of adequate opportunities, rewards and satisfactions. Yet proposals to extend birth-control facilities to these classes of people, particularly the young unmarried girls, the potential young unmarried mothers, evokes entirely understandable moral opposition. Is it not condoning immorality? I suppose it is. But which is the lesser evil, until we are able to remoralise whole groups and classes of people, undoing the harm done when already weak restraints on strong instincts are further weakened by permissiveness in television, in films, on bookstalls?"

"From the mid-Victorian era till a few years ago, we were confident that our society was moving under its own momentum, or as a result of our reforms, towards the goals summed up by the term embourgeoisement. The artisan of Victorian days, who read serious literature, supported radical causes, was sober and self-improving, gave hope that the workers would become bourgeois... In their inception, the trades unions, co-operative societies and friendly societies reflected bourgeois thought, and aspired to achieve the benefits of bourgeois life for their members, as Lenin, among others, complained."

"I thought I was a Conservative. I thought I was a Conservative, but all the time I was in favour of... I was in favour of shortcuts to Utopia. I was in favour of the government doing things, because I was so impatient for good things to be done."

"Making the rich poorer does not make the poor richer, but it does make the state stronger—and it does increase the power of officials and politicians, power more menacing, more permanent and less useful than market power within the rule of law. Inequality of income can only be eliminated at the cost of freedom. The pursuit of income equality will turn this country into a totalitarian slum."

"Keynes was certainly not a Keynesian."

"We are over-governed, over-spent, over-taxed, over-borrowed and over-manned."

"Monetarism is not enough."

"There is an anti-enterprise climate. The educational system is divorced from industrial understanding... The socialist ethic of institutionalized envy is fostered by many politicians, communicators and academics. A pattern of esteem has grown up which tends to perpetuate an unbalanced deployment of brain power. The Government pre-empts an excessive share of rare talents, scientific and technological, often for prestige projects of little interest to consumers."

"Profits have nearly vanished in real terms. Inflation nearly destroyed balanced sheets, helped by misleading accounting practices. There is all too little awareness among politicians and officials of the concept of opportunity cost, that you cannot have your cake and eat it."

"The more subsidized and overmanned and make-work jobs we carry as a community, the less competitive we are and the more we shall lose our markets at home and overseas to our rivals... The process is cumulative. It is based on the two simple facts that we depend on raw materials and goods from abroad which we must pay for by selling goods and services abroad; and that not even the TUC can force foreigners to buy our output."

""Moderates" behind whom Red Fascism spreads."

"Low output a man, which is what overmanning comes to, means low pay a man. Overmanning does not protect British jobs except in the short-term. The jobs protected by it are German and Japanese jobs. Overmanning is a large part of the British disease and the Labour Government actually encourages it. The industrial strategy, a verbal smokescreen, may blather on about being competitive but nearly every action taken under it involves a subsidy from the taxpayer to overmanning."

"Although expenditure on regional incentives will continue to be substantial, I must emphasise that regional differences will not be reduced simply by redistributing money from taxpayers; there needs also to be local enterprise and plenty of co-operation in making businesses competitive and profitable. Nothing will do more for the prosperity of a region than a reputation for effective work, high productivity and co-operation between work force and management."

"Unions, in order to obtain higher pay, tend to threaten private employers with bankruptcy and public employers, nationalised or State, with disruption and damage to the public, and they tend to threaten employers, regardless of the demand for the product or service, regardless of the demand for their labour and skills, regardless of the profit or loss of the employer, regardless of the scope for increased productivity and regardless of the freedom of union members to move in search of higher pay if they can get it elsewhere. The word "regardless" is near the heart of the British disease."

"Unions often force private employers to choose between the immediate disaster of a long strike if they resist or the deferred disaster of crippled competitiveness and squeezed profit if they give way. What British unions in general tend to demand, and extract, from employers is all too often something for nothing—increased earnings regardless—a demand for higher pay without a readiness to co-operate in financing that higher pay by higher productivity. The result of such pay increases is higher unit costs and so higher prices, tiny real profits, blunted competitiveness and therefore fewer jobs and lower pay and pensions than would otherwise be possible."

"We need to develop within our children and young people the capacity to respect the cultures and beliefs of the different groups that make up our society; and we need to develop the resolve to treat each other justly. Secondly, we must eliminate, so far as any society can, the under-achievement of many of our children and young people from all sections of the community. We need to raise the performance of all pupils and to tackle the obstacles to higher achievement which are common to all. But we also need to tackle those special factors which additionally may contribute to the under-achievement of many members of our ethnic minorities."

"The entrepreneur is the person who seeks to identify what consumers, at home or abroad or both, want and would be willing to buy at a profitable price. These entrepreneurs are the job-creators because it is they who gather the men and women, the material, the machinery, and the money to turn the vision of a market into a reality."

"All my life, I thought I was a Conservative. Now I know that I have never been one. The scales have dropped from my eyes."

"We found it hard to avoid the feeling that somehow the lean and tight-lipped mufflered men in the 1930s dole queue were at least partly our fault."

"It was apparently Chris Patten, as director of the Conservative Research Department in the late 1970s, who came up with the 'Mad Monk' epithet which stuck to Joseph for the reason that makes some nicknames and caricatures irresistible: immediate recognition. It was not the whole truth; it was not simply a hostile slur (Joseph saw the joke himself); it was, even so, a way of tagging a major politician whose driving ambition was not focused simply on his own advancement."

"The speech is deeply disturbing in that it attempts to cast the poor as the villains who are undermining society. For a nation which has successfully fought against Nazism, it is worrying that any attempt should be made to find scapegoats... Although in the cool of the evening he will probably choose to deny it, the speech bore all the marks of whipping up a campaign against the poor. It put forward family planning as a remedy without stating that the primary way to help these mothers was to give them money and education as an incentive to limit their families."

"A wonderful mixture of Rasputin and Tommy Cooper."

"Keith was one of the kindest men I ever met in British politics; he had a brilliant mind, an unswerving integrity and a rigorous commitment to any conclusions that he reached... what you could never question about Keith was the sincerity of his beliefs or the reasonableness with which he put them."

"Keith was a fascinating man to work with: hugely intelligent (a fellow of All Souls) yet immensely unsure of himself; eager to question everything, including not least his own premises; always thinking aloud, even the unthinkable. To make a long journey with him was like travelling with a foraging squirrel: he was constantly tearing articles out of newspapers, writing notes to himself and stowing them about his person. Problems sometimes arose for him from the need to make order from this whirlwind of ideas, and so to arrive at sustainable executive decisions."

"The Secretary of State's attitude was callous and amounted to a dereliction of duty. The steel workers and their families will draw their own conclusions, but I believe that for generations to come the name Joseph will stink in the nostrils of the people of South Wales."

"Although Keith could turn in a first-rate despatch box performance when he was really in the mood, he was too unworldly to be a really effective politician in the practical sense. Tormented by self-doubt, devoid of guile, and with a passion to educate, he laboured under the delusion that everyone else, friend or foe, was as intellectually honest and fundamentally decent, as lacking in malice and personal ambition, as he was."

"[In September 1974] Sir Keith Joseph broke the Heath line with a speech on Tory economic mistakes which Powell described as "an admirable anthology from my speeches on the subject in recent years." Sir Keith made no acknowledgements; powellism without Powell suddenly offered big political rewards, and Sir Keith set up, soon afterwards, an institute to depowellise the alternative Conservatism with which he proposed to transform the Party, and perhaps his own position in it."

"From the start, there was a tendency in the Shadow Cabinet to move away from the Heath line of policy further to the Right: to this I was totally opposed. In particular, I could not support the arguments of Keith Joseph, who was inclined to say that all we had done in the Government of 1970–74 was wrong and not true Conservatism. I totally disagreed with this, because it seemed to me that Keith was fully entitled to measure himself for a hair shirt if he wanted to, but I was blowed if I could see why he should measure me and Ted at the same time. I could not help recalling Selsdon Park, and the swing to the Right in our policies which occurred then, and how long it had taken in Government to get back to the realities of life. I feared that the same thing was beginning to happen again. In particular there was the argument about Incomes Policy and Money Supply, and which was the right way to deal with inflation. I stuck to the view that an Incomes Policy was essential and had been a necessary part of the policies of Conservative Governments since it was first introduced by Peter Thorneycroft when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer. The other doctrine, the monetarist doctrine of which Keith Joseph was the most articulate and intellectual exponent, said that Incomes Policy was unnecessary and unworkable, and that inflation could best be contained by restricting the money supply. This doctrine, based on the teachings of Professor Friedman, seemed to me to be totally divorced from reality. In so far as it was a guide to action at all, it merely was a restatement in new phraseology of the old doctrine of a credit squeeze. But the tide was running strongly in the monetarist direction at that time."

"[He is] nutty as a fruit-cake."

"His offence does not consist in discovering and confessing past error. If he had been elected in 1970 on a policy of price and wage controls to cure inflation, I would have no complaint if subsequent experience and reflection led him to conclude that the policy was unsound. That is not what happened. He was elected "utterly rejecting the philosophy of compulsory wage control". As an intelligent man, he knew why such a strong assertion could safely be made – namely, the irrelevance of such control to inflation, which therefore had other causes. That policy was suddenly reversed in the third quarter of 1972 by the government to which Joseph belonged; and he was not so immersed in the social services as not to know. He held his peace, however, until he no longer had cabinet office, salary, car and chauffeur to sacrifice and could expect to gain rather than lose personally by re-affirming what he had always been aware of."

"[He is] a very fine person, of deep and strong convictions and an unmistakable sincerity which adds to [the] force and persuasiveness of his arguments."

"Few men have been so cruelly misrepresented. The portrayal of Keith as an insensitive axeman, or the mad monk, was unfair and totally remote from reality. I found in Keith not only one of the major intellects of the Thatcher Government but one of the kindest, most highly principled, thoughtful and decent men in politics – or anywhere else."

"Keith is always a power because he has a tremendous brain and great intellectual capacity. He's a very shy person. He's one of the most sympathetic people. You know, shy people are often very sympathetic but are rather afraid of showing it; but he had a most marvellous record when he was Secretary of State for the Social Services, and I think he's got a great deal to offer. You always need a first class mind to co-ordinate the thinking out of new policies. After all, we had Rab Butler, you know 1945–50, Keith in a way is the new Rab Butler of the 1973 period."

"He is one of the party's progressive intellectuals, and his judgment is widely respected although he is not the most bravura performer at the Dispatch Box."

"I am tremendously grateful to him, not personally but for the lead he has given the country—it is what has been needed for a very long time. One thing that Sir Keith spelt out very clearly was the way that the extreme left had cashed in on permissiveness. I believe passionately that you cannot separate our economic ills from our present moral decadence. Until this speech, the people of Britain have been like sheep without a shepherd. But now they have found one."

"Together with Joseph, Howe was very soon the most influential politician in the most important field of Thatcherite politics: the breaking of the economic consensus. The leader occupied a kind of middle position between them. Joseph articulated ideas, Howe formulated policies, and Mrs Thatcher was the essential conduit from one to the other."

"We are asked to permit a hundred men to go round to the house of a man who wishes to exercise the common law right in this country to sell his labour where and when he chooses, and to 'advise' him or 'peacefully persuade' him not to work. If peaceful persuasion is the real object, why are a hundred men required to do it? … Every honest man knows why trade unions insist on the right to a strong numerical picket. It is because they rely for their objects neither on peacefulness nor persuasion. Those whom they picket cannot be peacefully persuaded. They understand with great precision their own objects, and their own interests, and they are not in the least likely to be persuaded by the representatives of trade unions, with different objects and different interests. But, though arguments may never persuade them, numbers may easily intimidate them. And it is just because argument has failed, and intimidation has succeeded, that the Labour Party insists upon its right to picket unlimited in respect of numbers."

"Instead of seeing that men got enough to eat the Government spent the whole Session in securing that they should have nothing to drink."

"Free trade had once and for all broken down. Even when combined with depredation it did not pay; it could not find them the money to pay this year's national bills. The Conservative party had one alternative to a Budget which destroyed capital—the alternative of men who had watched the history of tariffs in Europe and America for 30 years, and learnt the great lesson upon which Bismarck taught his fellow-countrymen."

"...votes are to swords exactly what bank notes are to gold—the one is effective only because the other is believed to be behind it."

"The Conservative Party is the parent of trade unionism, just as it is the author of the Factory Acts. At every stage in the history of the nineteenth century it is to Toryism that trade unionism has looked for help and support against the oppressions of the Manchester School of liberalism, which cared nothing for the interests of the state, and regarded men as brute beasts whose labour could be bought and sold at the cheapest price, irrespective of all other considerations."

"An MP had been elected as a Unionist candidate, but when Parliament re-assembled, he had immediately "crossed the floor" without seeking re-election. Smith said:"He entered the House not on the crest of a wave, but rather by means of an opportune dive. Everyone in the House must appreciate his presence, for there could be no greater compliment paid to it than that he should be in our midst, when his heart is far away. And it should be obvious to all who know the honourable gentleman's scrupulous sense of honour, that his one desire at present is to be amongst his constituents, who are understood to be at least as anxious to meet him.""

"May I be perfectly candid? I also am still a Unionist in this sense. If I were certified of twenty years of unbroken power in this country, I am still most clearly of opinion that the solution of the Irish question which would be best for England and best for Ireland would be the prosecution during that period of the policy which, in our opinion at least, had attained so large a measure of success in the year 1906. ... The late Lord Salisbury spoke of "twenty years of resolute government." The Unionist Party, in the period to the close of which I refer, had been given some ten years, and it was only given those ten years by what many members of this House would describe as the accident of the issue, with its repercussion on the Election, of the war in South Africa. That accident and that Election gave the Unionist Party some ten years of office. Is it not evident, in trying to descry what lies in front of us through the mists of the future, that no man living can claim that twenty years, or anything like twenty years, lie in front of any Party that believes in the maintenance of the relations between Ireland and this country on the lines that have existed since the passing of the Act of Union?"

"Politically, economically and philosophically the motive of self-interest not only is but must...and ought to be the mainspring of human conduct...For as long a time as the records of history have been preserved human societies passed through a ceaseless process of evolution and adjustment. This process has sometimes been pacific, but more often it has resulted from warlike disturbance. The strength of different nations, measured in terms of arms, varies from century to century. The world continues to offer glittering prizes to those who have stout hearts and sharp swords; it is therefore extremely improbable that the experience of future ages will differ in any material respect from that which has happened since the twilight of the human race … it is for us who, in our history have proved ourselves a martial … people … to maintain in our own hands the adequate means for our own protection and … to march with heads erect and bright eyes along the road of our imperial destiny."

"An economic creed in an imperfect world must be at least equally adapted to the purposes of war as to the purposes of peace. ... when war came in 1914, what was the situation of this country? The free-trade system had wholly failed to equip the Government of this country with the many instruments which were absolutely vital for the purposes of conducting war."

"It appears that we are to reconcile ourselves to the fact that we are to have 1,300,000 unemployed in this country. There are no unemployed in the United States of America, no unemployed at all in France. There are hardly any unemployed in Italy. The United States of America, France, and Italy are protectionist countries. We are a free-trade import country."

"I have read the Liberal programme. They talk of cooperation between employer and employed. That is not the problem. There is no use in cooperating when there is no work to be done. There is no use in imposing capital levies upon a capital which every year dwindles and disappears. ... The problem that awaits the people of this country is to increase the markets within which their goods can find employment, and you will never increase those markets until you have enabled our working people on equal terms and our manufacturers on equal terms to deal with the working people and manufacturers of the world."

"The Glasgow address ["Idealism in International Politics"] represented a true conception of Tory policy. ... During those black years from 1906 to 1914 he and other members of this party warned the country that the deadly and growing menace of German armaments might involve, unless steps were taken to correct it, the imminent destruction of this country and Empire. How were their warnings treated? Foolish idealists told them there was no menace. ... But while Liberals and Socialists passed resolutions calling for reduction of armaments, the Tories, not so deceived, insisted on the supreme importance of strengthening the Army and the Navy."

"As the Tories happened to be right then, and their opponents happened to be wrong, as they had been wrong at every moment in the nation's history when similar issues had arisen, was he to remain silent when men were preaching the same crazy doctrine that there would be no more war and when he looked round and saw wars and threats of wars? Whenever he met such sentimental folly he would castigate it."

"The greatness of this country was attained not by teaching the message that one class of Englishmen must wed itself to a bitter antagonism against other classes of Englishmen, but was was rather founded on the doctrine that they were all English. All that was changed. They were to be class conscious. ... It means that we are to drive into that solidity of English life, which has secured our greatness, the poison of a belief that the interests of England require that there should be vital and eternal antagonism in her midst which prevents all Englishmen uniting for an all-English cause. In the old spacious days of Queen Elizabeth, when the Empire was still in the winning, as well as in the days of the Napoleonic Wars, we conquered by the force of a gallant and united nation. We did not march to battle under the Red Flag."

"Nobody disputed that in the year 1914 it was evident to everyone that the country would have to struggle for its life. Knowing that, Mr. MacDonald stated that the war had been deliberately engineered by the fighting forces of this country in order to obtain battle-practice for our fleet. ... The people of this country had now the chance of deciding whether they wished to see this ancient country presided over and governed by a man who, had he had his way, would have ruined and destroyed us in the war; and he knew what their answer was going to be. They were going to say to him, “Dress yourself in your red flag or your yellow flag; go and attend your board meetings in the McVitie Company. We do not believe you for this reason—that every speech you make contains some piece of shifty, tricky inventiveness which we have never been used to from the Prime Minister of England.”"

"I charge him [Ramsay MacDonald] deliberately with this, that from the first moment of the war to the Armistice there was nothing which he could say to embarrass the cause of the British arms that he did not say—there was nothing that he could do to assist the German cause that he did not do. That is the man I am asked to take as spokesman of the British Empire. ... He was the man who vied with Sir Roger Casement in disservice to Britain. In the greatest crisis in our history Mr. MacDonald tried to set up Soviets in the British Army. I am to treat him as spokesman of the British Empire? Never! Never!"

"We have the highest authority for believing that the meek shall inherit the earth; though I have never found any particular corroboration of this aphorism in the records of Somerset House."

"Like you, I believe strongly that where there is a revolutionary element expressed in action, one must act resolutely. My reading of Indian history has led me to believe that a Government founded so completely as ours is upon prestige can stand almost anything except the suspicion of weakness."

"To me it is frankly inconceivable that India will ever be fit for Dominion self-government."

"I have always placed my highest and most permanent hopes upon the eternity of the Communal situation. The greater the political progress made by the Hindus, the greater, in my judgment, will the Moslem distrust and discontent become. All the conferences in all the world cannot bridge over the unbridgeable, and between these two communities lies a chasm which cannot be crossed by the resources of modern political engineering."

"It would be possible to say without exaggeration that the miners' leaders were the stupidest men in England if we had not frequent occasion to meet the owners."

"Nature has no cure for this sort of madness, though I have known a legacy from a rich relative work wonders."

"What was intended is plain. It was intended to appease them. Why was this particular moment selected for their appeasement? I will tell your Lordships why. It was because a grave threat had been made subversive of civil government in India. ... I have had occasion in the last six years to make such study of Indian history as my abilities have qualified me to undertake, and I have drawn one deep lesson. The way to discharge our fiduciary obligations to India is never to yield to threats—never, never! The moment in which to make gestures of appeasement is not when you are threatened by men of influence and authority with a general campaign of civil disturbance. And what a method to select! You address the politically-minded classes of India. They are the only ones with which you are dealing, for you do not suppose that the 290,000,000 of peasants who cannot read are being appeased; they do not need appeasement and we were long since told of their pathetic contentment. What was the object of making this statement at this moment?"

"Judge: You are extremely offensive, young man! Smith: As a matter of fact we both are; and the only difference between us is that I am trying to be, and you can't help it."

"Judge: What do you suppose I am on the Bench for, Mr. Smith? Smith: It is not for me, Your Honour, to attempt to fathom the inscrutable workings of Providence."

"Churchill has spent the best years of his life preparing impromptu remarks."

"Judge: I've listened to you for an hour and I'm none wiser. Smith: None the wiser, perhaps, my lord but certainly better informed."

"High Court judge presiding in a sodomy case, seeking advice on sentencing: "Could you tell me, what do you think one ought to give a man who allows himself to be buggered?" Smith: "Oh, thirty shillings or two pounds; whatever you happen to have on you.""

"...although in many well-paid trades the attitude of labour is unreasonable and grasping, the wrongs under which many poor persons labour are so cruel and so undeniable that it is astounding that any school of political thought should conceive a policy of inactivity to be possible. I should like to inscribe on the walls of every Conservative club, and particularly of those clubs to which the wealthier members of the party belong, these words from Mr Booth's Life and Labour of the People: "The result of all our inquiries makes it reasonably sure that one-third of the population are on or just above the line of poverty or are below it"."

"I entertain no doubt that Tariff Reform would considerably alleviate these evils, but I have never believed that it will end them. Which party in the State stands to lose most by their continuance? Is it not evident that the party, to whom stability and content are vital, is far more deeply concerned to restore happier conditions than the party which lives upon discontent and the promulgation of class hatred? A contented proletariat should be one of the first objects of enlightened Conservative policy."

"According...to our Individualist and Free Trade friends, Prince Bismarck ought to have come to the conclusion that German industries were from "natural causes" unfit as compared to their British rivals; that they could never hope to hold their own in the struggle for existence, and that it would be cheaper to buy in the British market. That great statesman, who was never deceived either by the ideologues of Individualism or the ideologues of Socialism, saw very clearly that though this might be the case for the moment it need not be the case in all perpetuity, but that to give way for the moment was to give way for ever. English goods might beat German goods for the given year, but granted a tariff and the encouragement of State-aid, German goods might be beating British in under a quarter of a century. The static comparison was against the German Empire, but the dynamic impulse given to German industry by the tariff of 1878 has carried her right to the front, and the result of the policy has been of enormous profit to the German exchequer."

"Disraeli, in his youth, laid down the principles on which the England of his time ought to have been based, and his comparative failure to convince his contemporaries or to overbear his philosophic opponents left his country the richer by a supreme instance of political genius and the poorer by its slums, its wasted physique, and its industrial unrest and class hatred. If a Providence could have made Disraeli a dictator in the early 'thirties, there would have been no social problem to-day. That great man desired to build up the new industrial State on the principles and practice which had animated the older rural and urban dispensations—on the community of interest between master and man, between capitalist and employee, between guild and guild, between agricultural labourer and town workman. What was best in the feudal conception of the past was to be applied to the new progressive forces of the nineteenth century, and the aristocracy of industry was to follow in the tradition of the aristocracy of feudalism and make itself the guardian, and not the exploiter, of its new retainers."

"We stand for the State and for the unity which, whether in the form of kingdom or empire or class solidarity, the State alone can bring. Above all stands the State and in that phrase lies the essence of Toryism. Our ancestors left it to us, and not the least potent method of preserving it is to link the conception of State Toryism with the practice of Social Reform."

"Who are we that we should invite Germany to acquiesce in the principles of "Uti Possidetis" at a moment when we possess comparatively everything and they possess comparatively nothing? It is a law as old as the world's history that those who hold valuable possessions coveted by others will hold them so long as, and no longer than, they are able to protect them by the strong arm."

"Abuse of Germany for doing what we ourselves did, and for cherishing ambitions which every powerful nation at every stage of the world's history has entertained, is childish, irrelevant, and futile. History laughs at such criticisms. Lord Roberts made no such mistake. With penetrating instinct he stated his admiration of German temper and German discipline. Every virile citizen of any nationality, and, indeed, every person whose judgment is not debauched by a sentimentalism wholly out of contact with facts, will echo Lord Roberts' tribute. Abuse, disapproval, and pious exhortations are all utterly useless. Only one thing is useful. This country, if it means to survive, must develop its preparations upon the same scale and in the same spirit as does the great nation whose ambitions and development we are examining."

"Either we must make up our minds that we will not take part in a European war under any circumstances, or we must have national service; but we cannot make up our minds on the first of these points unless we are prepared to do what our ancestors to their eternal glory refused to do in the days of Napoleon, acquiesce in the hegemony of Europe by one titanic Power."

"F. E. Smith is very clever, but sometimes his brains go to his head."

"He was brilliant and witty. His conversation was like a flashing display of fork lighting. He was a man without nerves, physically brave to a point of recklessness; willing at any time to put his limbs on the board as cheerfully as a smaller stake."

"He was throughout his career a consistent Tory, faithful to a version of the party philosophy that was not harsh or unfeeling but was full of light and sentiment and sympathy for the problems of his fellow-countrymen. In council he was sensible and prescient; in argument he was persuasive, while his methods in debate gave additional proof of his superior ability. He was a good friend. I always thought of him as the cleverest man in the kingdom. He did not dissemble. He did not suffer fools. And of him Bonar Law said, "It would be easier for him to keep a live coal in his mouth than a witty saying.""

"He had all the canine virtues in a remarkable degree – courage, fidelity, vigilance, love of chase."

"If he was with you on Monday, he would be the same on Tuesday. And on Thursday, when things looked blue, he would still be marching forward with strong reinforcements."

"Birkenhead's pure eighteenth-century. He belongs to the days of Fox and Pitt. Physically, he has all the strength of our best yeoman stock. Mentally, he's a colossus. But he'll tear himself to pieces by the time he's sixty."

"He is a powerful intellect, a democrat."

"The country was as much amused as affronted when Sir F. E. Smith became Attorney-General. But it is carrying a joke beyond the limits of pleasantry to make him Lord Chancellor. There are gradations in these matters."

"While in Paris I saw a good deal of the Lord Chancellor (F.E.) – an interesting study. Very clever and brilliant, but drinks too much. Far more than is good for him... He has some wild political notions. He said if the Labour people show signs of revolution, we must shoot. Shooting is the right method to repress such agitations. The trade unions are tyrannical. We made a great mistake to permit them to maintain Members of Parliament."

"[David Lloyd George] made a strong defence of F. E. Smith. Somehow or other he always thrusted the worst side of his nature on to the public, whereas he was a man of sterling character and one of the finest he had ever known... When L[loyd] G[eorge] made him Lord Chancellor, there were a number of important people, including judges, who "thought I made a great mistake". But some time afterwards two judges, one of whom was Lord Dunedin, came and said: "When you made Birkenhead Lord Chancellor, we frankly thought you had made a great mistake. We now see you were right and we were wrong. He is the best Lord Chancellor we have ever had"."

"The press – the popular press – is drinking in the Last Chance Saloon."

"The tabloids are like animals, with their own behavioural patterns. There’s no point in complaining about them, any more than complaining that lions might eat you."

"Lawyers are like rhinoceroses: thick-skinned, short-sighted, and always ready to charge."

"And I'd like to say this to [Sir James Goldsmith] ... who has got nothing to be smug about, and I would like to say that 1,500 votes is a derisory total. We have shown tonight that the Referendum Party is dead in the water, and Sir James can get off back to Mexico knowing your attempt to buy the British political system has failed."

"There is no design involved. It would look tawdry down the wrong end of a beach in Torremolinos. This isn't a case of just not wanting it in my backyard. This area is historically significant with listed buildings and it's next to the Tower of London, which is a world heritage site."

"The Minister for Fun."

"Since the great days of Jimmy Greaves, it's the only time anyone's managed to score five times in a Chelsea shirt."

"This is the first time in ages that David Mellor has done the decent thing."

"My first car was painted red down one side and blue down the other to confuse witnesses in case of an accident."

"Nobody ever seemed quite clear whether the expression "drunk as a lord" should be taken as a compliment or an insult."

"The only exercise I ever take is walking up hospital stairs to visit friends who've damaged themselves by taking exercise."

"Before the War you took your secretary to Paris and called her your wife. Now, in order to wriggle through the tax-gatherer's net, you take your wife to Paris and call her your secretary."

"Cricket is a game which the English, not being a spiritual people, have invented in order to give themselves some conception of Eternity."

"It is ridiculous that British troops are here in Crossmaglen. The claim is that they're in Ireland keeping the peace between the two communities. But there is only one community in South Armagh, so what the heck are they doing here?"

"I should make it clear [...] that we do not accept that Britain has a special responsibility to meet the costs of land purchase in Zimbabwe. We are a new government from diverse backgrounds without links to former colonial interests. My own origins are Irish and, as you know, we were colonised, not colonisers."

"They say 10,000, double, treble and then think of another number. It will be golden elephants next. They have got to stop this game. It is bad governance. It's hysterica scaremongering, which is whipping people up."

"I also believe that US backing for Israeli policies of expansion of the Israeli state and oppression of the Palestinian people is the major cause of bitter division and violence in the world."

"She sounds like a mouthpiece for an old nineteenth-century colonial and Conservative government."

"His Majesty's Government contemplate the inclusion in the R.A.F. contingent in the March of a representative party of 25 Polish airmen (including one officer) who fought in the Battle of Britain. There will he no separate representation of other Polish armed forces now in this country, since these do not form part of His Majesty's Forces, but the Polish Government have been invited to send a contingent of three high-ranking officers, three aides-de-camp or staff officers and a flag party of three men, followed by a detachment of.24 men representative of the Polish fighting services."

"It is not insurrection we now want in Italy, or elsewhere—we want disciplined force, under Sovereigns we can trust."

"I still feel great doubts about the acquisition in sovereignty of so many Dutch colonies. I am sure our reputation on the Continent, as a feature of strength, power, and confidence, is of more real moment to us than an acquisition thus made. The British merchants ought to be satisfied, if we secure them a direct import."

"It is impossible not to perceive a great moral change coming on in Europe, and that the principles of freedom are in full operation. The danger is, that the transition may be too sudden to ripen into anything likely to make the world better or happier. We have new constitutions launched in France, Spain, Holland, and Sicily. Let us see the result before we encourage farther attempts. The attempts may be made, and we must abide the consequences; but I am sure it is better to retard than accelerate the operation of this most hazardous principle which is abroad."

"These arguments about natural defences and strategic boundaries are pushed too far. Real defence and security comes from the guarantee which is given by the fact that they cannot touch you without declaring war on all those interested in maintaining things as they are."

"If we are to undertake the job, we must leave nothing to chance. It must be done upon the largest scale... [Y]ou must inundate France with force in all directions. If Bonaparte could turn the tide, there is no calculating upon his plan; and we must always recollect that Poland, Saxony, and much Jacobinism, are in our rear."

"You will fully appreciate the Parliamentary importance of not having imputed to us that Louis XVIII., by being made an Ally against Buonaparte, has been made master of the confederacy for his own restoration. His Majesty cannot wish us to feel more decisively the importance of his restoration than we do; and most assuredly every effort will be made so to conduct the war so as to lead to this result, but we cannot make it a sine qua non. Foreign Powers may justly covenant for the destruction of Buonaparte's authority as inconsistent with their own safety, but it is another question avowedly to stipulate as to his successor. This is a Parliamentary delicacy."

"I hope you will be able to make M. de Blacas and those about the king understand, that John Bull fights best, when he is not tied, and that, altho' as a line of policy we can with good management connect the support of the Bourbons with the avowed object of the war, we never could sustain as a principle, that we were committed irrevocably to His Majesty to make this a sine qua non under every possible circumstance. Such an engagement would defeat its own purpose by rendering that questionable, which if done voluntarily, would command a general concurrence."

"The steadiness of this country in the war will depend upon our making it clear that the Continent has voluntarily decided to seek its safety in arming."

"Fouché and men of his stamp are nowhere so little to be dreaded as in office, mixed up with other materials. Tyrants may poison or murder an obnoxious character, but the surest and only means a constitutional sovereign has to restrain such a character is to employ him. Office soon strips him of his most dangerous adherents—he comes unpopular, he can be laid aside at pleasure, and sinks to his true lead. So far from making himself visibly responsible for everything, the King ought to throw upon his Ministers the odium and risk of conducting his service. His Majesty ought to turn the political control towards the Minister for the time being and not entertain it himself beyond affording him the due support which his services may deserve. This is the true strength of a constitutional king. All paper constitutions are of comparatively small importance; the essence of a free state is so to manage the party warfare, as to reconcile it with the safety of the sovereign—to do this, the King must give the contending parties facilities against each other, and not embark himself too deeply with any."

"I much suspect neither Austria nor Prussia, and certainly none of the smaller Powers, have any sincere desire to bring the present state of things to a speedy termination: so long as they can feed, clothe, and pay their armies at the expense of France, and put English subsidies into their pockets besides, which nothing can deprive them of, previous to the 1st of April, 1816, but the actual conclusion of a treaty with France, you cannot suppose they will be in a great hurry to come to a final settlement, since the war may be said to have closed."

"No doubt, the prevailing sentiment throughout Germany is in favour of territorially reducing France. After all the people have suffered, and with the ordinary inducements of some fresh acquisitions, it is not wonderful that it should be so; but it is one thing to wish the thing done, and another to maintain it when done; and, in calculating the chances of the latter, we ought to be aware that none of these Powers can, for any time, keep up war establishments, or, having once laid them down, find the means of speedily resuming them; and that, if the course adopted materially increases the chances of early war with France, these acquisitions may be of short duration, whilst our chances of an interval of peace will be diminished, and we may be obliged, in order to keep France within any bounds, to take the weight of the war, in a pecuniary sense, upon ourselves."

"My belief and hope, then, is, if the arrangement is made with some attention to the feelings and interests of the country, that the King, his Government, and the loyal party in France, will ally themselves with you; and that, thus sustained, the King will be able gradually to establish his authority, which, if accomplished, is valuable beyond all other securities we can acquire. If he fails, we shall not have to reproach ourselves with having precipitated his fall, and we shall have full time to take our precautions. If, on the contrary, we push things now to an extremity, we leave the King no resource in the eyes of his own people but to disavow us; and, once committed against us in sentiment, he will be obliged soon either to lead the nation into war himself, or possibly be set aside to make way for some more bold and enterprising competitor. The whole of this view of the question turns upon a conviction that the King's cause in France is far from hopeless, if well conducted, and that the European alliance can be made powerfully instrumental to his support, if our securities are framed in such a manner as not to be ultimately hostile to France, after she shall have given protracted proofs of having ceased to be a revolutionary State."

"I have no doubt the middle line would be the most popular, and that, in extorting the permanent cession of one or two fortresses of great name, our labours would carry with them an éclat which is not likely to attend them, according to the course we recommend. But it is not our business to collect trophies, but to try if we can bring back the world to peaceful habits. I do not believe this to be compatible with any attempt now materially and permanently to affect the territorial character of France, as settled by the Peace of Paris; neither do I think it a clear case (if we can, by imposing a strait waistcoat upon that Power for a number of years, restore her to ordinary habits, and weighing the extraordinary growth of other States in latter times, and especially of Russia) that France, even with her existing dimensions, may not be found a useful rather than a dangerous member of the European system."

"I feel no wrath against the people. I am only doing my duty."

"The present Confederacy may be considered as the union of nearly the whole of Europe against the unbounded and faithless ambition of an individual Napoleon]. It comprehends not only all the great monarchies, but a great proportion of the secondary Powers. It is not more distinguished from former Confederacies against France by the number and magnitude of the Powers engaged than by the national character which the war has assumed throughout the respective states. On former occasions it was a contest of sovereigns, in some instances perhaps, against the prevailing sentiment of their subjects; it is now a struggle dictated by the feelings of the people of all ranks as well as by the necessity of the case. The sovereigns of Europe have at last confederated together for their common safety, having in vain sought that safety in detached and insulated compromises with the enemy. They have successively found that no extent of submission could procure for them either safety or repose, and that they no sooner ceased to be objects of hostility themselves, than they were compelled to become instruments in the hands of France for effectuating the conquest of other unoffending states. The present Confederacy may therefore be pronounced to originate in higher motives and to rest upon more solid principles than any of those that have preceded it, and the several Powers to be bound together for the first time by one paramount consideration of an imminent and common danger."

"It is this common danger which ought always to be kept in view as the true basis of the alliance, and which ought to preclude defection from the common cause. It must be represented to the Allies that having determined to deliver themselves from the vengeance of the conqueror by their collective strength, if collectively they fail, they are separately lost. He never will again trust any one of them with the means of self-defence—their only rational policy then is inseparable union—to make the contest that of their respective nations, to persevere under every disaster, and to be satisfied that to end the contest safely the enemy must be compelled to treat with them collectively, whilst the best chance of an early peace is at once to satisfy the enemy that a separate negotiation is unattainable."

"As opposed to France, a peace concluded in concert, though less advantageous in its terms, would be preferable to the largest concessions received from the enemy as the price of disunion. The great object of the Allies, whether in war or negotiation, should be to keep together, and to drive back and confine the armies of France within the circle of their own immediate resources. This alone can bring down the military force of the enemy to its natural level, and save Europe from being progressively conquered with its own spoils."

"To suppose that the Powers on the side of Germany might be induced to sign a peace, leaving Great Britain and the nations of the Peninsula to carry on the war, or that the enemy being expelled from the Peninsula, Spain might sheath the sword, leaving the Continental Powers to sustain the undivided shock of French power, is to impute to them all a total blindness to their common safety. Were either of these interests to attempt to shelter themselves in a separate peace, it must leave France master of the fate of the other, and ultimately of both. It is by the war in Spain that Russia has been preserved, and that Germany may be delivered; it is by the war in Germany that Spain may look to escape the subjugation that otherwise ultimately await her. So long as both manfully contend in the field against France, neither can be absolutely overwhelmed, and both, upon every sound principle of military calculation, must by perseverance triumph. To determine to stand or fall together is their only safety, and to effect this the confederates must be brought to agree to certain fixed principles of common interest."

"He had now the satisfaction to say, that although he was unable to announce the immediate and actual abolition of the [[Atlantic slave trade|[slave] trade]], all the Powers of Europe had agreed that it should not be extended beyond the period at which by possibility it could be terminated. They had concurred in a solemn address to the world, on the necessity of sweeping a trade, so intolerable in a moral point of view, from the face of the earth, and had pledged themselves to take no further time for that purpose than was necessary for the internal regulation of their own dominions."

"It was no small gratification to him to have brought the different Powers of Europe, not only to an agreement to the principle of the abolition [of the slave trade], but to an early and absolute accomplishment of it. He heartily wished that he could announce that this curse of humanity had ceased to exist, but final sentence had been passed upon it."

"The question which the House would have to decide was, whether a system had been created under which all countries might live in that peace which it was the great object of the confederacy to establish. A difference of sentiment on some points of the arrangements could be no impeachment of the wisdom of the whole. Perfection belonged to no work of human beings, even when many years were devoted to it; much less when its completion was accelerated by the necessity of circumstances. On this general principle he applauded and was prepared to maintain the proceedings of the Congress at Vienna."

"The Allies had made war, not for the sake of subjugating any power, but for the sake of preserving the whole of Europe from subjugation; they had succeeded in their object; and they had endeavoured to give to the different powers of the European commonwealth a protection from that danger by which they had already been destroyed."

"If Buonaparté succeeded in re-establishing his authority in France, peace must be despaired of; at least such a peace as we had recently the hope of enjoying. The question now was, whether Europe must once more return to that dreadful system which it had so long pursued; whether Europe was again to become a series of armed nations, and whether Great Britain among them was to abandon that wholesome state into which she was now settling, to resume her station as a military people, and again to struggle for the independence of the world? These were questions of no small magnitude, depending upon events now in issue, depending upon a new and an unexpected contest, in which the liberties of mankind were once more assaulted and endangered."

"It was not merely a question whether the Bourbon family, which had already given so many benefits to France, and among them, that best of all benefits, peace, should continue to reign in France, but whether tyranny and despotism should again reign over the independent nations of the continent? Whether as applied to this country, we should enjoy the happy state that we had bought with our blood after a long struggle, or whether we should once more revert to that artificial system which, during that struggle, we were compelled to maintain? Upon these points there could exist only one feeling, and his lordship trusted that Providence would ordain only one result."

"The system of the Emperor [of Russia] did him honour as a monarch and as a man. Nothing could be more pure than the ends which he had set before himself in all his actions; but this system aims at a perfection, which we do not believe applicable to this century or to mankind. We cannot follow him along this path. It is a vain hope, a beautiful phantom, which England above all can not pursue. All speculative policy is outside her powers. It is proposed now to overcome the revolution; but so long as this revolution does not appear in more distinct shape, so long as this general principle is only translated into events like those of Spain, Naples and Portugal—which, strictly speaking, are only reforms, or at the most domestic upsets, and do not attack materially any other State—England is not ready to combat it. Upon any other question purely political, she would always deliberate and act in the same way as all the other Cabinets."

"In this Alliance, as in all other human Arrangements, nothing is more likely to impair, or even to destroy its real utility, than any attempt to push its duties and its obligations beyond the Sphere which its original conception and understood Principles will warrant.—It was an Union for the re-conquest and liberation of a great proportion of the Continent of Europe from the military domination of France; and having subdued the Conqueror, it took the State of Possession, as established by the Peace, under the protection of the Alliance.—It never was, however, intended as an Union for the Government of the World, or for the Superintendence of the Internal Affairs of other States."

"It provided specifically against an infraction on the part of France of the state of possession then created: It provided against the Return of the Usurper or any of his Family to the throne: It further designated the Revolutionary Power which had convulsed France and desolated Europe, as an object of it's constant solicitude, but it was the Revolutionary power more particularly in its Military Character actual and existent within France against which it intended to take Precautions, rather than against the Democratic Principles, then as now, but too generally spread throughout Europe."

"In thus attempting to limit the objects of the Alliance within their legitimate Boundary, it is not meant to discourage the utmost frankness of communication between the Allied Cabinets; their Confidential Intercourse upon all Matters, however foreign to the Purposes of the Alliance, is in itself a valuable expedient for keeping the current of sentiment in Europe as equable and as uniform as may be... but what is intended to be combated as forming any part of their Duty as Allies, is the Notion, but too perceptibly prevalent, that whenever any great Political Event shall occur, as in Spain, pregnant perhaps with future Danger, it is to be regarded almost as a matter of course, that it belongs to the Allies to charge themselves collectively with the Responsibility of exercising some Jurisdiction concerning such possible eventual Danger. One objection to this view of our Duties, if there was no other, is, that unless We are prepared to support out interference with force, our judgment or advice is likely to be but rarely listened to, and would by frequent Repetition soon fall into complete contempt. So long as We keep to the great and simple conservative principles of the Alliance, when the Dangers therein contemplated shall be visibly realised, there is little risk of difference or of disunion amongst the Allies."

"We may all agree that nothing can be more lamentable, or of more dangerous example, than the late revolt of the Spanish Army: We may all agree that nothing can be more unlike a monarchical Government, or less suited to the wants and true interests of the Spanish nation, than the Constitution of the year 1812; We may also agree, with shades of difference, that the consequence of this state of things in Spain may eventually bring danger home to all our own doors, but it does not follow, that We have therefore equal means of acting upon this opinion."

"In this country at all times, but especially at the present conjuncture, when the whole Energy of the State is required to unite reasonable men in defence of our existing Institutions, and to put down the spirit of Treason and Disaffection which in certain of the Manufacturing Districts in particular, pervades the lower orders, it is of the greatest moment, that the public sentiment should not be distracted or divided, by any unnecessary interference of the Government in events, passing abroad, over which they can have none, or at best but very imperfect means of controul."

"Great Britain has perhaps equal Power with any other State to oppose Herself to a practical and intelligible Danger, capable of being brought home to the National Feeling:—When the Territorial Balance of Europe is disturbed, she can interfere with effect, but She is the last Govt. in Europe, which can be expected, or can venture to commit Herself on any Question of an abstract character."

"We shall be found in our Place when actual danger menaces the System of Europe; but this Country cannot, and will not, act upon abstract and speculative Principles of Precaution."

"It will naturally occur to every virtuous and generous mind, and to none more probably than to the Emperor of Russia's own,—indeed it is the first impression which presents itself to every reflecting observer when he contemplates the internal state of European Turkey—viz. : Is it fit that such a state of things should continue to exist? Ought the Turkish yoke to be for ever rivetted upon the necks of their suffering and Christian subjects; and shall the descendants of those, in admiration of whom we have been educated, be doomed in this fine country to drag out, for all time to come, the miserable existence to which circumstances have reduced them?"

"It is impossible not to feel the appeal; and if a statesman were permitted to regulate his conduct by the counsels of his heart instead of the dictates of his understanding, I really see no limits to the impulse, which might be given to his conduct, upon a case so stated. But we must always recollect that his is the grave task of providing for the peace and security of those interests immediately committed to his care; that he must not endanger the fate of the present generation in a speculative endeavour to improve the lot of that which is to come."

"I cannot, therefore, reconcile it to my sense of duty to embark in a scheme for new modelling the position of the Greek population in those countries at the hazard of all the destructive confusion and disunion which such an attempt may lead to, not only within Turkey but in Europe. I am by no means persuaded, were the Turks even miraculously to be withdrawn (what it would cost of blood and suffering forcibly to expel them I now dismiss from my calculations) that the Greek population, as it now subsists or is likely to subsist for a course of years, could frame from their own materials a system of government less defective either in its external or internal character, and especially as the question regards Russia, than that which at present unfortunately exists. I cannot, therefore, be tempted, nor even called upon in moral duty under loose notions of humanity and amendment, to forget the obligations of existing Treaties, to endanger the frame of long established relations, and to aid the insurrectionary efforts now in progress in Greece, upon the chance that it may, through war, mould itself into some scheme of government, but at the certainty that it must in the meantime, open a field for every ardent adventurer and political fanatic in Europe to hazard not only his own fortune, but what is our province more anxiously to watch over, the fortune and destiny of that system to the conservation of which our latest solemn transactions with our Allies have bound us."

"On the sad day following that of his death, one of his servants was asked whether he had remarked any change in him; the answer was 'Yes;' and being further asked to state the nature of the change, he replied, 'One day he spoke sharply to me!'"

"Put all their other men together in one scale, and poor Castlereagh in the other—single, he plainly weighed them down... One can't help feeling a little for him, after being pitted against him for several years pretty regularly. It is like losing a connection suddenly. Also, he was a gentleman, and the only one amongst them."

"Just and passionless."

"It is not, however, by one or two isolated successes that Lord Castlereagh's foreign policy ought to be tried. It is best judged by its general results. During the war his aim was to overthrow Napoleon, and to reduce France within her ancient limits. After the war his aim was to uphold the balance of power, and so to secure lasting peace to Europe. When the direction of England's foreign policy passed from his hands, both objects had been attained... For forty years the peace of Europe flourished undisturbed by one single conflict between any of the five great Powers who adjusted their differences at Vienna... Europe has not enjoyed so long a repose from the curse of war since the fall of the Roman empire. Such an achievement is an ample justification of the acts of the Congress of Vienna and of the minister who bore so large a part in shaping its decrees."

"It was a mere calumny to call him an enemy to freedom. In its truest and most literal sense—the exemption from oppression—he did more for it than any statesman of his age. We have the testimony of the Duke of Wellington, that he had done more to destroy the slave-trade than any man in Europe; and the struggle which absorbed the best years of his life was a struggle on a vast scale for the liberties of mankind."

"[F]rom Napoleon's tyranny time gave no respite, and insignificance no escape. His exactions ground down every income, and his massacres, thinly disguised under military names, thinned every village, from Reggio to Lilbeck. To have borne a large part in freeing Europe from such a scourge as this—to have provided securities that made it for the future an impossibility—was to have done a greater service to the cause of freedom than any shifting of the equilibrium of electoral power is ever likely to effect."

"Most sincerely do I congratulate you; and be assured that the fullest justice is done to the great abilities you have displayed through the whole of the transactions which you have so successfully and wonderfully managed. Your superiority and authority are now fixed."

"As for my friend Lord Castlereagh, he is so cold that nothing can warm him."

"As a Minister he is a great loss to his party, and still greater to his friends and dependants, to whom he was the best of patrons; to the country I think he is none. Nobody can deny that his talents were great, and perhaps he owed his influence and authority as much to his character as to his abilities. His appearance was dignified and imposing; he was affable in his manners and agreeable in society. The great feature of his character was a cool and determined courage, which gave an appearance of resolution and confidence to all his actions, and inspired his friends with admiration and excessive devotion to him, and caused him to be respected by his most violent opponents. As a speaker he was prolix, monotonous, and never eloquent, except, perhaps, for a few minutes when provoked into a passion by something which had fallen out in debate... He never spoke ill; his speeches were continually replete with good sense and strong argument, and though they seldom offered much to admire, they generally contained a great deal to be answered. I believe he was considered one of the best managers of the House of Commons who ever sat in it, and he was eminently possessed of the good taste, good-humor, and agreeable manners which are more requisite to make a good leader than eloquence, however brilliant."

"[I]t was this man, more than any other, who forged again a European connection for Britain, who maintained the Coalition, and negotiated the settlement which in its main outlines was to last for over fifty years. Psychologists may well ponder how it came about that this Irish peer, whose career had given no indication of profound conceptions, should become the most European of British statesmen. No man more different from his great protagonist, Metternich, could be imagined. Metternich was elegant, facile, rationalist; Castlereagh, solid, ponderous, pragmatic; the former was witty and eloquent, if somewhat pedantic; the latter cumbersome in expression, although effective in debate; Metternich was doctrinaire and devious; Castlereagh, matter-of-fact and direct. Few individuals have left behind them such a paucity of personal reminiscences. Icy and reserved, Castlereagh walked his solitary path, as humanly unapproachable as his policy came to be incomprehensible to the majority of his countrymen. It was said of him that he was like a splendid summit of polished frost, icy, beautiful, aloof, of a stature that nobody could reach and few would care to."

"There was one at Paris, however, who for a brief three months represented the conscience of Europe. It is difficult to explain why it should have been Castlereagh who resisted the Prussian clamour for the dismemberment of France in which even Metternich joined to the extent of demanding the permanent dismantling of the outer belt of French fortifications. Or why he should have refused always in such periods to go along with the Cabinet and Parliament, both urging a punitive peace. Yet France was spared and the equilibrium of Europe saved by the representative of the insular power which stood in least danger from immediate attack. At no other time in his career did Castlereagh show to greater advantage than in his battle for the equilibrium at Paris. Misunderstood at home, without the support of the moral framework which Metternich had provided in previous frays, he conducted himself with his customary methodical reserve, cumbersomely persuasive, motivated by an instinct always surer than his capacity for expression. This was the man on whom Europe for two generations heaped opprobrium as the destroyer of its liberties, because so much had the political equilibrium come to be taken for granted that the social contest overshadowed all else; to the extent that it was forgotten that without the political structure so resolutely preserved by Castlereagh, there would have been no social substance left to contend for."

"His character will not be very easily defined in the page of history in which it must stand so conspicuously from the great events with which it has been connected. No man certainly ever traded so largely on so small a capital, but presence of mind, some sagacity, a good temper and good manners supplied the place of knowledge and eloquence."

"I cannot praise Castlereagh enough. His attitude is excellent and his work as direct as it is correct. I cannot find a single point of difference with him and assure you that his mood is peaceful, peaceful in our sense."

"It is a great misfortune. The man is irreplaceable, especially for me... Castlereagh was the only person in his country who had experience in foreign affairs."

"Quest.—Why is a Pump like Viscount Castlereagh? Answ.—Because it is a slender thing of wood, That up and down its awkward arm doth sway, And coolly spout, and spout, and spout away, In one weak, washy, everlasting flood!"

"Mackintosh used to say of Castlereagh that he had all the inferior qualities of a leader in an extraordinary degree. Though his language was often ungrammatical, his metaphors and figures so strangely perplexed and confused as to set the House a laughing, yet I have heard him speak in such a powerful, impressive and eloquent style as would have done honour to any man. The more he was pressed...the better he spoke, both in matter and manner. He was a handsome, fine looking man, good natured, high bred, and his courage was so undoubted that he could allow people to take liberties with him, or disregard them, as unworthy of his notice, which other men might have lost reputation by not resenting."

"Castlereagh, who had been often pointed out as the successor of Pitt, wanted the large views of that great man... [He] was an obscure orator, garnishing his speeches with confused metaphors... He had no classical quotations, no happy illustration, no historical examples... Yet his influence with his party was very great, and he was, till near the close of his life, a successful leader of the House of Commons. For this end he possessed...very considerable advantages. He was, as a man of business, clear, diligent, and decided. His temper was admirable – bold and calm, good humoured and dispassionate. He was a thorough gentleman; courteous, jealous of his own honour, but full of regard for the feelings of others. No one doubted his personal integrity, however much they might dislike his policy."

"I met Murder on the way— He had a mask like Castlereagh—"

"There probably never was a statesman whose ideas were so right and whose attitude to public opinion was so wrong. Such disparity between the grasp of ends and the understanding of means amounts to a failure in statesmanship."

"Our system is not fit for purpose. It's inadequate in terms of its scope, it's inadequate in terms of its information technology, leadership, management systems and processes."

"It's not my job to manage this department - it's my job to lead this department."

"He said he did not believe the Home Office was "intrinsically dysfunctional... but I do believe from time to time it is dysfunctional in the sense it doesn't work"."

"Leadership isn't a zero sum game. When one of us shines it doesn't diminish the others, it reflects on all of us."

"It's not Muslims versus the rest of us. It's evil terrorists on one side against all civilised people on the other."

"If we in this movement are going to ask the decent, silent majority of Muslim men - and women - to have the courage to face down the extremist bullies, then we need to have the courage and character to stand shoulder to shoulder with them doing it."

"Until Roy Hattersley said he would shoot himself if I became prime minister, I had not been able to see any possible advantage in standing."

"You don't have to love everything George W. Bush stands for to hate everything that Osama Bin Laden stands for."

"at its worst amounts to a sort of Zen fascism; less extreme, it denounces growth and seeks to stop the world so that we can all get off."

"In a democracy everybody has a right to be represented, including the jerks."

"There is a sort of exotic preposterousness about a lot of elections, the way arguments are made even cruder."

"[M]y anxiety is not that this community's autonomy would be usurped by Beijing, but that it could be given away bit by bit by some people in Hong Kong."

"As governor, I experienced the vitality of life in a booming and free Asian city, saw routinely the best and worst aspects of human nature, and was made to revisit some of the principles in which I have always believed but to which I had rarely given much thought previously. In the darker hours of occasionally fretful nights I found myself face to face with the moral dimensions of political action to a greater extent than ever before."

"No other place has quite the same blend of East and West, ancient and modern, spectacular and humdrum."

"It is not unusual for electorates to want contradictory things, and politicians often make promises accordingly."

"[O]n July 1, 1997, Hong Kong became the only example of decolonization deliberately accompanied by less democracy and a weaker protection of civil liberties. This was a cause for profound regret, especially for the departing colonial power. But it was China's doing and China's decision. I am pleased that Britain narrowly avoided complicity in the dishonourable act of denying the citizens of free Hong Kong what they had been promised in 1984."

"Asians...put more emphasis on order, stability, hierarchy, family and self-discipline than Westerners do."

"Those of us who had a perfectly happy childhood should be able to sue for deprivation of literary royalties."

"It's obviously an issue [democracy] which is hugely important to a new generation."

"You know perfectly well there have been attacks on the rule of law, on the independence of the judiciary; abductions around Hong Kong streets; suggestions that Hong Kong’s autonomy needs to be curtailed in the future; suggestions that the autonomy of Hong Kong’s tremendous universities is something that has to be looked at again; there is a sense that free speech is under threat."

"Xi Jinping and his court have regarded Hong Kong and Hong Kong's freedoms as an existential problem for them because Hong Kong represents so much of what they dislike."

"It matters to everyone [sic] of us that the press tell it as it is, not as the government wants us to hear."

"While we were allegedly taking part in a golden age of China, the head of the Chinese Communist Party was instructing party officials and government officials to engage in an intense struggle against all the things that we and other liberal democracies stand for: Rule of law, parliamentary democracy, universally valid human rights, historical inquiry, all those sorts of things."

"[Nigel Farage] offers nothing for a healthy Conservative future. His saloon bar bluster, if translated into policy, would give us Liz Truss economics, Jeremy Corbyn foreign policy (which would be much loved by Putin) and an approach to our nation's identity akin to that of Tommy Robinson (albeit Tommy Robinson with a cravat)."

"Prostitute...tango dancer...a sinner for a thousand years."

"On the pro-life side of the fence, the public takes little notice of those who want to abolish abortion. They are dismissed as extremists. If I were to argue that all abortions should be banned, the ethical discussions would go round in circles because one person’s opinion is as valid as another's. My view is that the only way forward is to argue for a reduction in the time limit."

"I am not an MP for any reason other than because God wants me to be. There is nothing I did that got me here; it is what God did. There is nothing amazing or special about me, I am just a conduit for God to use."

"If we were in government and David [Cameron] didn't give me a front bench position, I would barricade myself inside his office until he did."

"I started blogging because I believe my constituents, who pay me, have a right to know what I get up to in Westminster. Many MPs are so secretive about how they spend their time but I say b******s to that."

"Do you know the people who have no voice in this country? Who are never written about, who journalists never talk about? The mums. Mums who decide that they will give up their careers and stay at home and look after their children."

"[In the 2005–2010 parliament, it was] very difficult to talk about the family unit, and to talk about mothers and children . . . as the foundation of society, because it was seen as a very unsexy, untrendy thing to do and the opposite of what a woman should be doing."

"My blog is 70% fiction and 30% fact. It is written as a tool to enable my constituents to know me better and to reassure them of my commitment to Mid Bedfordshire. I rely heavily on poetic licence and frequently replace one place name/event/fact with another."

"Unfortunately, I think that not only are Cameron and Osborne two posh boys who don't know the price of milk, but they are two arrogant posh boys who show no remorse, no contrition, and no passion to want to understand the lives of others - and that is their real crime."

"Gay marriage is a policy which has been pursued by the metro elite gay activists and needs to be put into the same bin [as reform of the House of Lords]."

"Be seen within a mile of my daughters and I will nail your balls to the floor... using your own front teeth. Do you get that?"

"[On relaxed EU restrictions on immigration from Bulgaria and Romania] There has been no tidal wave but there might be tomorrow, there might be next year - we don't know – and that is the problem. We could have a tidal wave from Yugoslavia."

"This deal gives us no voice, no votes, no MEPs, no commissioner."

"[On the question of privatising Channel 4, later an abandoned policy] I would argue that to say that just because Channel 4's been established as a public service broadcaster, and just because it's in receipt of public money, we should never kind of audit the future of Channel 4 and we should never evaluate how Channel 4 looks in the future, and whether or not it's a sustainable and valuable model, it’s quite right that the Government should do that."

"I can personally tell you that the Prime Minister, when he stands at the despatch box and makes quotes like the one you just quoted, is because the researchers and his advisers will have given him that quote, and that's... and he was truthful, to the best of his knowledge, when he made that quote [...] The Prime Minister does tell the truth."

"[On how well Channel 5 was doing] they were privatised a small number of years ago, three years ago, five years ago maybe."

"There is a process and the last thing I would want to do would be to cause a by-election in my constituency."

"It is my belief that when Rishi Sunak told Boris Johnson he would sign off the list returned to him by Holac, he was using weasel words [...] He already knew who was and wasn't on that list because he had engineered it via his aide [[w:James Forsyth (journalist)|[James] Forsyth]]. I'm not going to lie. I believe sinister forces conspired against me and have left me heartbroken - but that emotion gives me all the strength I need to keep on fighting."

"This expert legal opinion shows that the inquiry was a biased, Kafkaesque witch hunt – it should now be halted before it does any more damage. (Daily Mail, 1 September 2022)."

"[T]hey [the privileges committee] have nothing. He protested his innocence all along and he was right. It was a gross miscarriage of justice, at the very least. (Twitter, 3 March 2023)."

"I don’t think there was ever a world in which this committee was going to find Boris innocent. The committee have demonstrated very clearly that they have decided early on to find him guilty. (TalkTV, 23 March 2023)."

"[W]e also need to keep a close eye on the careers of the Conservative MPs who sat on that committee. Do they suddenly find themselves on chicken runs into safe seats? Gongs? Were promises made? We need to know if they were. Justice has to be seen to be done at all levels of this process. (Twitter, 15 June 2023)."

"I am grateful for your personal phone call on the morning you appointed your cabinet in October, even if I declined to take the call."

"It is a modus operandi established by your allies which has targeted Boris Johnson, transferred to Liz Truss and now moved on to me. But I have not been a Prime Minister. I do not have security or protection. Attacks from people, led by you, declared open season on myself and the past weeks have resulted in the police having to visit my home and contact me on a number of occasions due to threats to my person. Since you took office a year ago, the country is run by a zombie Parliament where nothing meaningful has happened. What exactly has been done or have you achieved? You hold the office of Prime Minister unelected, without a single vote, not even from your own MPs. You have no mandate from the people and the government is adrift. You have squandered the goodwill of the nation, for what?"

"It is a fact that there is no affection for Keir Starmer out on the doorstep. He does not have the winning X factor qualities of a Thatcher, Blair or a Boris Johnson, and sadly, prime minister, neither do you."

"[As the Conservative candidate for Mid-Bedfordshire in 2005] The circumstances of this selection are disputed: Dorries has since claimed that the candidate shortlist was made up mostly of men, whereas contemporary reports say it was largely women. This is noteworthy because, before she was selected, Dorries advocated all-women shortlists, but after her election she criticised David Cameron when he floated the idea of using them. Changing her mind has been a feature of Dorries's political career. She argued and voted against gay marriage, for example, dismissing it as a policy pursued "by the metro elite gay activists". She has since said that her opposition to the gay marriage bill was her "biggest regret"."

"There is perhaps an element of the unreliable narrator about the part-time novelist."

"As complex as it is to calibrate how much Dorries can take credit for normalising extreme MP moonlighting, ... her achievement in juggling political duties with the relentless production of novels, a third career on TalkTV and a fourth one as a Daily Mail columnist, looks almost uniquely harsh on affected constituents. Her website features, in the absence of surgery dates and political content, promotions of her TV slots and books. Add to that her all-purpose put-down (her own money being proletarian) of "posh boys", her employment on the public payroll of two daughters, her loyalty to the groper and wife-beater Stanley Johnson and a sideline in aggressive and misleading tweets, and you can almost understand Dorries’s incredulity on being finally, after all that, thwarted. At the point she was denied her peerage, she hadn't even been condemned by the privileges committee for her part in an "unprecedented and coordinated" attack on its members!"

"It has now been 395 days since the MP spoke in the Commons, 102 days since she voted and a remarkable three years and five months since she held a surgery — though her local office has continued to function. In that time, one pandemic and two prime ministers have been defeated. In addition, Dorries is reported to live 100 miles away from her constituency, in Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire."

""The slide" began in 2012, after Dorries' appearance on I'm a Celebrity, when eating ostrich anus seemingly went to her head."

"Nadine Dorries has exposed the split in the Conservative party between vulgarity and conformity. The decision of the MP for Mid Bedfordshire to go on I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here! is an astonishingly rude attack on the well-bred, self-controlled establishment headed by David Cameron."

"Let us examine first the case of the Tory MP Nadine Dorries, who was cleared last month by the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner of wrongly claiming some £60,000 in second-home allowances. Central to Dorries's defence was her assertion that she spent the bulk of her time in her old house in the Cotswolds (billed as her primary home) rather than her Bedfordshire constituency, which she stated was her secondary residence (and, therefore, allowable for expenses). Here, though, Dorries ran into an apparently insuperable problem: she had incriminated herself in her blog by giving the strong impression that she spent the majority of her time in Bedfordshire. Miss Dorries got around this difficulty by informing the parliamentary standards commissioner [about her blog being "70 per cent fiction and 30 per cent fact...".]"

"In other words, her blog was, for the most part, a lie, designed to give constituents the impression that she was doing her duty as a diligent MP in Bedfordshire when actually she was in another part of the country altogether. This is a wretched state of affairs and if David Cameron were a Tory leader who valued integrity and honesty, he would surely have ordered Miss Dorries to apologise personally to her constituents, and stripped her of the party whip there and then. Instead, he has done nothing."

"They are going up and down the country, stirring up apathy."

"I always think that it is entirely wrong to prejudge the past."

"[A Conservative government would operate a glasshouse system of detention centres for some of those young people] so that they receive a short sharp shock treatment which I hope will deter at least some of them from getting enmeshed deeper in the mire of crime."

"Encountered Willie Whitelaw at dinner. He came in rather late and then started to tell me how absolutely ghastly life was with that awful woman, how he was thinking of resigning (from the Shadow Cabinet), what was my advice, etc. So I said, "On the whole, don't resign, Willie." "Oh, good," he said. "No, don't resign," I said, "but distance yourself." "Quite right, quite right," he said, "quite right. It's better not to resign, but distance myself. That's right." A long and typical conversation with him, not to be taken too seriously."

"Every prime minister needs a Willie."

"I hope history will judge us to have tackled the problem effectively and delivered a sustainable future for Britain's public services."

"We have to demonstrate to the public that our commitment is protecting public services in the face of a spending contraction which is inevitable."

"Nobody is suggesting that the NHS doesn't have to reform, nobody is suggesting that it doesn't have to become more efficient, that productivity growth doesn't have to become positive … The only difference is that in health, because of the demographic pressure, the savings will all – and more – have to be reinvested in delivering more healthcare."

"If the choice is between a European Union written exactly as it is today and not being a part of that then I have to say that I'm on the side of the argument that Michael Gove has put forward [to leave the EU]."

"I believe that we have to negotiate a better solution that works better for Britain if we are going to stay in and play a part in the European Union in the future, but let me be absolutely clear: I think it is defeatist to sort of say we want to leave the European Union. We should say no, this is a club that we are members of, and before we talk about leaving it, first of all we're going to try and change the rules and change the way it works and change the objectives that it has in order to make it something that works for Britain."

"We have to be a forward-looking nation not a backward-looking nation, and I have to run the defence budget to deliver defence effect in the future, not to preserve regiments or shipyards just because they’ve been there for a long time in the past. And we move on. As a nation we move on."

"I think my position on the same-sex marriage thing probably sums up the kind of conservative that I am. I’m a small c conservative as well as a big C Conservative, and that means that I prefer my change to be evolutionary rather than revolutionary, and you know I got myself quite comfortable with the institution of civil partnership, but I was then quite shocked by the urge to move on so quickly to the next stage, but I dare say in time I will become quite comfortable with the institution of same-sex marriage, and I suspect I speak for a large number of Conservatives when I say it isn’t so much the substance of the change as the process and things being evolutionary and gradually taking root rather than through tumultuous change which is disturbing to the settled instinct."

"The British public has a strong sense that the situation of the civilian population in Gaza is intolerable and must be addressed — and we agree with them."

"But what has struck me most looking at my own constituency in-box as well as the thousands of emails that I’m receiving from the general public here is that it isn’t just the Muslim community that’s reacting to this. It’s a broad swathe of British public opinion that feels deeply disturbed by what it is seeing on its television screens coming out of Gaza."

"We understand that Israel has concerns, we understand that Hamas has concerns. We are not saying we’re not interested in those."

"So long as the European Union's laws are the way they are, many of them will only have to set foot in Europe to be pretty confident that they will never be returned to their country of origin. Now, that is not a sustainable situation because Europe can't protect itself and preserve its standard of living and social infrastructure, if it has to absorb millions of migrants from Africa."

"As my mother told me sticks and stones may break my bones but words don’t hurt me."

"Partly that is because they are simply tired of years of fighting each other and partly it is the galvanising effect of Daesh (IS)."

"It is clear we enter our negotiations to leave the EU from a position of economic strength"

"I am confident we can do a Brexit deal which puts jobs and prosperity first, that reassures employers that they will still be able to access the talent they need, that keeps our market for goods, services and capital open, achieves early agreement on transitional arrangements so trade can carry on flowing smoothly. The collective sigh of relief would be audible. The benefit to our economy would be huge."

"If you want my opinion, some of the noise is generated by people who are not happy with the agenda that I have, over the last few weeks, tried to advance, of ensuring that we achieve a Brexit which is focused on protecting our economy, protecting our jobs and making sure that we can have continued rising living standards in the future."

"[T]here are no unemployed people"

"I remember 20 years ago we were worrying about what was going to happen to the million shorthand typists in Britain as the personal computer took over. Well, nobody has a shorthand typist these days, but where are all these unemployed people? There are no unemployed people because we have created 3.5m new jobs since 2010."

"A trade deal will only happen if it is fair and balances the interests of both sides. Given the shape of the British economy, and our trade balance with the EU27, it is hard to see how any deal that did not include services could look like a fair and balanced settlement."

"There is light at the end of the tunnel... but we are still in the tunnel at the moment."

"the first sustained fall in debt for 17 years, a turning point in the nation's recovery from the financial crisis of a decade ago"

"Once we get a good deal from the European Union and the smooth exit from the EU we will be able to show the British people that the fruits of their hard work are now at last in sight,"

"[The] era of austerity is finally coming to an end"

"I take the judgement that when there is a deal on the table that has very, very modest costs to the economy, which will allow us to move on as a nation both economically and politically, I judge that even narrowly, economically that will be in the best interests of the country"

"In the 2016 referendum, a promise was made to the majority who voted for Brexit - that they were voting for a more prosperous future. Not leaving would be seen as a betrayal of that referendum decision. But leaving without a deal would undermine our future prosperity, and would equally represent a betrayal of the promises that were made."

"We are determined to get a deal. We recognise that a no-deal Brexit would be a very bad outcome for the UK and we are doing everything we can to avoid that,"

"Tomorrow [Thursday], we will have the opportunity to start to map out a way forward towards building a consensus across this House for a deal we can collectively support to exit the EU in an orderly way, to a future relationship that will allow Britain to flourish, protecting jobs and businesses."

"Parliament will not allow a no-deal exit"

"[The Treasury has] built up fiscal headroom to protect against the cost of a no-deal Brexit"

"I do agree with him, it would be wrong for a British government to pursue no deal as a policy and I believe it will be for the House of Commons, of which I will continue proudly to be a member, to ensure that doesn't happen."

"I have no doubt whatsoever that in a no deal exit we will need all of that money, and more, to respond to the immediate impacts of the disruption of a no deal exit,"

"But let me go further - the government's analysis suggests that in a disruptive no-deal exit there will be a hit to the Exchequer of about £90bn. That will also have to be factored in to future spending and tax decisions."

"The Commons has been clear already that it does not support a no-deal exit. That is my position, and as a backbencher I will continue to argue against a no-deal exit."

"No deal means we will have to spend the money, but not in a discretionary way"

"We can make sure that goods flow inwards through the port of Dover without any friction but we can't control the outward flow into the port of Calais"

"There should be a new and sincere attempt to reach a consensus. If we do not find a solution with the members, we may have to ask the British to give their opinion again, in one form or another."

"If the next government is sincere in its desire to reach an agreement with Europe, it must try to get more time. If it does not, the British parliament will insist on getting a new postponement. I will remain a member of the House of Commons. I will do everything in my power from my position to make sure that parliament blocks a Brexit without agreement."

"[No-deal Brexit is] not something I could ever sign up to"

"[No-deal Brexit would be] just as much a betrayal of the referendum result as not leaving at all"

"There is no mandate for a no-deal Brexit and a no-deal Brexit will be a catastrophe for the United Kingdom."

"Pakistanis, living in England? They're not in a class by nature of where they've come from."

"I do wish you wouldn’t keep going on about the nanny [...] If I’d had a valet, you’d think it was perfectly normal."

"I'm a man of the people. Vox populi, vox dei."

"We could have two referendums. As it happens it might make more sense to have the second referendum after the renegotiation is completed."

"the county of Somerset as defined by the Lieutenants Act shall revert to the customary time used prior to the Great Western Railway time established in 1840"

"Basically I want people to be able to get on with their lives without the government bossing them about. I’m all in favour of nannies but not the nanny state."

"You can't have too many people using a special loo or it's no longer special — but it's now a disabled loo, so anyone can use it."

"We could, if we wanted, accept emissions standards from India, America, and Europe. There'd be no contradiction with that [...] We could say, if it's good enough in India, it's good enough for here. There’s nothing to stop that."

"We could take it a very long way. American emission standards are fine – probably in some cases higher. I accept that we're not going to allow dangerous toys to come in from China, we don't want to see those kind of risks. But there's a very long way you can go."

"I am a late convert to social media and it's turned out to be great fun"

"It (the European Court of Justice) cannot be our senior court for a day after we leave the EU"

"Once we have left and we have control, there is a political argument about what levels of immigration we should have... that is really going to be a challenge and an issue for the competence of the Home Office. It is not so much a question of Brexit. It is Brexit which makes it possible, it is then administrative efficiency that will make it happen."

"Life is sacrosanct and begins at the point of conception,"

"I am a Catholic and I take the teachings of the Catholic Church seriously,"

"[The voluntary support given to food banks is] rather uplifting and shows what a compassionate country we are"

"The transition which the EU is offering means that we're still effectively in the European Union for the following two years,"

"We need to be free to do deals with the rest of the world. We must be out of the protectionist common external tariff which mainly protects inefficient EU industries at the cost to British consumers."

"How you police your border is a decision for a sovereign state"

"The Remainers are fighting their last rear-guard action to try and stop Brexit"

"[Accepting EU trade rules and regulations would be] the worst option [for Brexit]. It's hard to think of a worse idea."

"Leaving on a world trade deal is a perfectly sensible thing to do but I think we can do better"

"I think the idea of a second referendum is perfectly ridiculous."

"No Conservative would do anything to harm the union and that crucially includes Northern Ireland."

"What we are seeing from this government is a deliberate decision not to deliver a proper Brexit"

"Everybody wants a deal; the prime minister wants a deal, the EU wants a deal and the Irish wants a deal,"

"My suspicion is that any delay to Brexit is a plot to stop Brexit. This would be the most grievous error that politicians could commit."

"I have always thought that no deal is better than Mrs May's deal, but Mrs May's deal is better than not leaving at all."

"I want us to leave the European Union"

"It is a grave error to try and use legal process to settle political questions,"

"The issue at hand is whether it was right to use the gross or net level of our contribution to the European Union - that is a matter of free speech and the democratic process."

"The candyfloss of outrage we've had over the last 24 hours, which I think is almost entirely confected, is from people who never wanted to leave the European Union"

"And instead of this endless carping, saying it's difficult to get them, we should actually celebrate this phenomenal success of the British nation in getting up to a quarter of a million tests of a disease that nobody knew about until earlier in the year."

"I think it is a real scandal that UNICEF should be playing politics in this way when it is meant to be looking after people in the poorest, the most deprived, countries of the world where people are starving, where there are famines and where there are civil wars. And they make cheap political points of this kind, giving, I think, £25,000 to one council. It is a political stunt of the lowest order."

"The key is that we have our fish back: they are now British fish, and they are better and happier fish for it."

"I think you're being very rude to marsupials ... I think it makes kangaroo courts look respectable [On The World at One (BBC Radio 4)]"

"Boris is doing very well against the marsupials. [Tweet during the hearing]"

"[T]he privileges committee is not even a proper legal set up. It has a gossamer of constitutional propriety thrown over it, but it is in fact a political committee against Boris Johnson."

"Parties that try and gerrymander end up finding their clever scheme comes back to bite them – as dare I say we found by insisting on voter ID for elections. We found the people who didn’t have ID were elderly and they by and large voted Conservative, so we made it hard for our own voters and we upset a system that worked perfectly well."

"I thought Uxbridge was a fundamentally important result for us. It shows that if you are on the side of voters and doing things to make their lives better, rather than worse, then lo and behold people will actually vote for you. Let other countries catch up and let us catch their breath. Let us move away from an ideological view of net zero and work with the environment in a way that is affordable."

"I've done my bit by having six children, so now you do yours."

"I want cheaper food. I want hormone-injected beef from Australia. I've eaten beef in Australia, it's delicious. There's nothing wrong with it."

"If I were American I'd want the border closed, I'd be all in favour of building a wall. I'd want to build a wall in the middle of the English Channel."

"The answer lies in reuniting the Right. What we need is a big, open and comprehensive offer to those in Reform."

"With the help of Nigel Farage in a Conservative government, as a Conservative minister, with Boris Johnson probably returning as foreign secretary and welcoming the likes of Ben Habib and Richard Tice into our party, as well as pursuing genuinely conservative policies, winning the next election suddenly becomes within reach."

"Recall that Rees-Mogg likes to pose as a custodian of our unwritten constitution. In fact, he is a vandal in pinstripes, ready to undermine public trust in the very parliamentary democracy he pretends to cherish."

"[T]he Honourable Member for the 18th Century."

"His manners are perfumed, but his opinions are poison. Rees-Mogg is quite simply an unfailing, unbending, unrelenting reactionary."

"[C]harming and funny, kind, mad and totally himself."

"I know that within the Tory party the hard Brexiteers are compared to the leaders of the French revolution. I think Gove is Brissot, and Boris Johnson is Danton, and Rees-Mogg is compared to Robespierre. We should not forget that the efforts of these men were not appreciated by the common man they claimed to represent – because they all ended up on the guillotine. So that’s important to remind [them]."

"In 1997 he was selected to contest Central Fife, a gritty former mining region and the last place in the UK to elect a Communist MP. As he went from door to door, it emerged that the elderly lady accompanying him was his nanny. But rumours that he took the Bentley are nothing short of scurrilous. "Of course I took nanny!" he cries. "She’s one of the family – and I needed all the support I could get. But I didn’t drive the Bentley – I couldn’t have afforded the petrol – so it was the Merc.""

"I think that now is exactly the wrong time to have a pause. What we have seen this week reinforces the need to make sure we have active communities trying to stop people becoming radicalised. I do recognise what Baroness Warsi said about needing to make more of an effort to sell [Prevent] to communities. We need to do better there to show that this is a safeguarding initiative, it's about protecting young people."

"Leaving the EU is harder than a lot of people thought it was going to be"

"Even when you spoke to Boris in person, you never knew who you’d be addressing but when he gets home and takes off the mask, which version remains? The caricatured orator or the caring statesman. Does he even know? Or is he, like Janus, actually both versions equally, and happy to choose the mask that suits that day’s audience best?"

"I think all of us agree what we don't want Britain to be: anti-competitive with more laws made overseas and with people travelling here for the benefits on offer rather than to pay their way. But we also don't want our children to inherit a Britain cut off from the world, where their prospects are limited and their opportunities end at our shores."

"From safeguarding parental leave to tackling discrimination in the workplace and bringing an end to violence against women and girls, our EU membership is critical in helping protect and further the rights of women around Britain. A vote to leave would put all of this at risk."

"It's clear, that if Britain leaves Europe it will be young people who suffer the most, left in limbo while we struggle to find and then negotiate an alternative model. In doing so we risk that lost generation becoming a reality."

"If parents and grandparents vote to leave, they'll be voting to gamble with their children and grandchildren's future. At a time when people are rightly concerned about inter-generational fairness, the most unfair decision that the older generation could make would be to take Britain out of Europe and damage the ability of young people to get on in life."

"We would have been better off if we had stayed, but that is what democracy is all about and the British people have been clear and I will accept that decision."

"It's incumbent on politicians to make the case that it is not for blaming immigrants about jobs and housing. Actually, it is up to us to provide the solutions and support to people."

"Seriously? Our two most senior female politicians are judged for their legs not what they said #appallingsexism"

"Of course one of the things the last couple of years has shown is that making predictions about British politics or international politics is incredibly difficult at the moment. But I think the Conservative party - having started on the Brexit road - really is going to own the negotiations, is going to own the shape of Brexit. That is clearly going to be something that will be, if not the issue of the election, will be something that we will be standing on that record in terms of the party going into the next election."

"As a constituency Member of Parliament, I receive a barrage of views on both sides of the EU debate all the time, so I am very conscious, even if it may not be my own personal position, of what other people in the country and my constituency are thinking."

"It's going to happen, we are going to leave the European Union"

"All this sabre-rattling this weekend is not coming from the section of the party that I represent. It is coming from the pro-Brexit section of the party. And it is deeply unhelpful."

"[The UK is being asked to experiment with a new trade policy without any idea of its costs. That is not a manifestation of democracy, it is a tyranny, a distortion of the referendum result and MPs should call it out."

"A Canada-style deal would take years to negotiate and might not give the kind of access its supporters hoped for"

"[Having to choose between deal and no-deal] appears to be an attempt by the executive to frustrate our sovereign Parliament"

"I agree with Paddy Ashdown when he said everybody in Britain should have the chance to be a somebody. But only one family can provide the head of state. We Liberal Democrats believe in opportunity for all. We believe in fairness, common sense. We believe in referenda on major constitutional issues. We do not believe that people should be born to rule, or that they should put up and shut up about decisions that affect their everyday lives."

"Two-thirds of the apples and nine-tenths of the pears that we eat are imported, not to mention two thirds of the cheese. And that is a disgrace. From the apple that dropped on Isaac Newton’s head to the orchards of nursery rhymes, this fruit has always been a part of Britain. I want our children to grow up enjoying the taste of British apples as well as Cornish sardines, Norfolk turkey, Melton Mowbray pork pies, Wensleydale cheese, Herefordshire pears and of course black pudding."

"EU membership brings economic security, peace and stability"

"We should all raise a toast to our biggest export success. Europe has a taste for Scotch and the industry will do better if we remain in the EU because whisky producers have hassle-free, easy access to the single market of 500 million people. The Scotch whisky industry has strong global trade links beyond Europe in America and Asia, and their business leaders are clear that the EU single market provides the best conditions to reach even greater heights. Leaving the EU would be a leap in the dark for our great British food and drink industry and could lead to years of negotiations on new trade deals - with no guarantees at the end."

"What people in the Leave campaign are saying is "We can have our cake and eat it". We can't."

"If we didn't have quotas there would be overfishing and we would have no fish left."

"I would rather be at the table making decisions with other countries than walking away and not having a say."

"I don't want my daughters to grow up in a world where they need a visa or permit to work in Europe, or where they are hampered from growing a business because of extortionate call costs and barriers to trade. Every parent wants their children to grow up in a healthy environment with clean water, fresh air and thriving natural wonders. Being part of the EU helps protect these precious resources and spaces."

"The fact is it is a simple bill on whether we trigger Article 50. The British people have voted for that and was clear in the referendum. The House of Lords now needs to get on with it. I fully expect the House of Lords will recognise the will of the people and the House of Commons."

"I embrace the chaos. I'm a thrillseeker."

"I voted against a delay to Brexit."

"I think there’s a danger in politics of being too risk-averse. I've fallen into that trap in the past and I'm not going to fall into it again. I'm now more honest about what I think."

"We need to look like we're enjoying ourselves because no one wants to go to a party where everyone is looking miserable."

"If it came down to a straight choice of revoking Brexit and a no-deal, I would choose no-deal."

"[On no deal when leaving the EU] To say there are no plans for this and it would be a disaster is wrong, we are prepared for an exit on the 31st October. What we need now is to have the political leadership to follow through on that and I believe that Boris Johnson is the person capable of that political leadership and making that happen."

"Is there anything more sexist than claiming your gender determines your worldview/behaviour/attitude?"

"[The UK and South Korea trade agreement will let businesses] keep trading as they do today, and they will be able to take advantage of the opportunities that Brexit offers"

"I once wrote a book about this which got mischaracterised – British workers produce less per hour than … and that’s a combination of kind of skill and application. [...] If you look at productivity, it’s very, very different in London from the rest of the country. But basically … this has been a historical fact for decades. Essentially it’s partly a mindset and attitude thing, I think. It’s working culture, basically. If you go to China it’s quite different, I can assure you [...] There’s a fundamental issue of British working culture. Essentially, if we’re going to be a richer country and a more prosperous country, that needs to change. But I don’t think people are that keen to change that. There’s a slight thing in Britain about wanting the easy answers. That’s my reflection on the election and what’s gone before it, and the referendum – we say it’s all Europe that’s causing these huge problems … it’s all these migrants causing these problems. But actually what needs to happen is more … more graft. It’s not a popular message."

"Thank you for putting your trust in me. I’m ready to hit the ground from day one."

"I feel like I’m a child of the union, I really believe we’re a family and we’re better together and I think the best thing to do with Nicola Sturgeon is ignore her. [...] She’s an attention seeker, that’s what she is."

"Q: You have supported a Prime Minister that has continually lied to the Queen, Parliament and the entire United Kingdom, therefore does this not bring into question your own personal integrity and honesty? A: I don't agree with that. Boris Johnson has been an excellent prime minister. He delivered on Brexit. He delivered on the Covid vaccine and he delivered on standing up to Vladimir Putin and backing the Ukrainians. I am proud of what he did."

"Q: President Macron, friend or foe? A: The jury’s out (applause). But if I become prime minister, I would judge him on deeds, not words."

"We shouldn't be daunted by the challenges we face. As strong as the storm may be, I know that the British people are stronger. Our country was built by people who get things done. We have huge reserves of talent, of energy, and determination. I am confident that together we can ride out the storm, we can rebuild our economy, and we can become the modern brilliant Britain that I know we can be. This is our vital mission to ensure opportunity and prosperity for all people and future generations. I am determined to deliver."

"I am a fighter, not a quitter."

"I came into office at a time of great economic and international instability. Families and businesses were worried about how to pay their bills. Putin's illegal war in Ukraine threatens the security of our whole continent. And our country had been held back for too long by low economic growth. I was elected by the Conservative Party with a mandate to change this. We delivered on energy bills and on cutting national insurance. And we set out a vision for a low tax, high growth economy — that would take advantage of the freedoms of Brexit. I recognise though, given the situation, I cannot deliver the mandate on which I was elected by the Conservative Party. I have therefore spoken to His Majesty The King to notify him that I am resigning as Leader of the Conservative Party."

"So it was that I won the leadership election with a clear mandate from my party in the country and, by the close of the ballot, the backing of the majority of MPs declaring a preference. I entered 10 Downing Street determined to deliver the bold action I had promised, with the economy and energy as my key priorities at the top of the in-tray."

"However, brewing in the background there was an issue relating to pension funds, which neither of us had been made aware of – a problem that would ultimately bring my premiership to an abrupt and premature end because of the panic it induced. At no point during any of the preparations for the mini-Budget had any concerns about liability-driven investments (LDIs) and the risk they posed to bond markets been mentioned at all to me, the chancellor or any of our teams by officials at the Treasury. But then, late on the Sunday night, came the jitters from the Asian markets as they opened. I was alerted to this on the Monday morning, at which point the Bank of England governor was wanting to make a statement on LDIs."

"I am not claiming to be blameless in what happened, but fundamentally I was not given a realistic chance to enact my policies by a very powerful economic establishment, coupled with a lack of political support."

"I do think sometimes politics is sort of treated as a branch of the entertainment industry, who's up, who's down, who says what about who."

"[On the Daily Star livestream, in her last days as PM, to see if her period in office could outlast a lettuce] I don't think it was particularly funny, I think it's puerile."

"Now people are joining the civil service who are essentially activists – they might be trans activists, they might be environmental extremists – but they are now having a voice within the civil service in a way I don't think was true 30 or 40 years ago, so we just have a wholly new problem. And frankly, 100 political appointees [aides], doesn't even touch the sides in terms of dealing with that."

"The place was infested with fleas. Some claimed that this was down to Boris and Carrie’s dog Dilyn, but there was no conclusive evidence. In any case, the entire place had to be sprayed with flea-killer. I spent several weeks itching."

"I'm a pretty honest person, I don’t get on with him personally. I haven't spoken to him since he entered Downing Street pretty much. I don't share his politics and I think he was disingenuous during the leadership contest and, frankly, he said many things I don't approve of while he was prime minister, including attacking my record."

"Patriotic Brits have had enough, they've had enough, and we look across the Atlantic with envy. We see President Trump in the executive, in the Oval Office signing off executive orders and we want some of that in Britain. [...] We want a Trump revolution in Britain, we want to flood the zone, we want Elon and his nerd army of Muskrats examining the British deep state. We missed the first American revolution in 1776, in fact it was a revolution against us, but we want to be part of the second American revolution."

"President Trump ... has been proven right about pretty much everything and now he is trying to do something about it, the elite is howling with indiscriminate outrage."

"The environment facing disruptors is not one of ignorance; it is one of hostility on the part of those who have an interest in your failing. Any slowing of the pace simply gives opponents more time to organise and you are restricted and then crushed by internal and external opposition. The only viable strategy is the one that Trump is employing of “flooding the zone” – of using shock and awe to challenge opponents and upend the status quo."

"[I]n a matter of weeks you lost the confidence of the financial markets, the electorate and your own MPs."

"At dinner in the beautiful home of Britain’s best-connected peer, I sit next to Liz Truss. Is our Foreign Secretary the new Mrs T as those photos of her commanding one of our few remaining tanks would have us believe? She is clearly a toughie, possessed of a steely self-belief, an imperviousness to the media, a healthy contempt for the male species, a seemingly genuine belief in a low-tax, small-state economy and a disarming habit of asking abrupt questions and dismissing the response as ‘bollocks’ — a tactic clearly designed to gain further elucidation. I liked her and suspect she’s a comer. So I hope she won’t mind me suggesting that she might benefit from a Maggie-style makeover to smooth that metallic voice and irritating raucous laugh."

"She has the boldness, vision and strength of conviction to build on what Boris began. That's why today the Mail backs Liz Truss for leader."

"Truss was a disastrous dalliance who served only to remind us what a real leader looks like."

"Liz Truss is already a historical figure. However long she now lasts in office, she is set to be remembered as the prime minister whose grip on power was the shortest in British political history. Ms Truss entered Downing Street on September 6th. She blew up her own government with a package of unfunded tax cuts and energy-price guarantees on September 23rd. Take away the ten days of mourning after the death of the queen, and she had seven days in control. That is the shelf-life of a lettuce."

"I welcomed much of [Liz Truss's] budget. I think if there is a criticism, they tried to do too much, too quickly, without prior explanation ... What happened here is the backbenches wobbled really quite quickly because a lot of Conservative backbenchers are basically globalists and listened to those big noises from the multinationals and the IMF. As soon as she sacked [[Kwasi Kwarteng|[Kwasi] Kwarteng]], it was all over … I would much have preferred her to hold her nerve, keep making those arguments and see if the party dared get rid of them."

"This is a naked conservatism that believes in itself with such fervour it thinks facts should make way for its fantasies. Borrowing for tax cuts in a period of surging inflation was always going to spook the markets, but Truss’s faith told her otherwise. She was determined to jump off the cliff, insistent that all the talk of gravity was so much stuffy scientific "orthodoxy". The refusal to bow to empirical evidence, to reality, is Truss conservatism’s defining feature. Its origins are not mysterious. We might call it Brexitism: the creed that holds that the real world, even the facts of geography, can be bent to your will, just by closing your eyes and wishing it were so."

"[In response to Truss's essay for The Telegraph published on 4 February 2023.] Truss’s wider point is that on economic matters, everyone else – the IMF, the OBR and the bond markets – was out of step with her. She had a mandate and that should have been respected. It is an odd argument for someone who professes to believe in markets. If your fiscal policies require you to borrow an additional £72bn, it is an unavoidable reality that you have to pay a lot of attention to what the people lending the money to you think. If they do not trust you, they will demand a higher price for lending to you."

"I knew Truss at university. She was a library-bound anorak, with no lingering smell of depravity about her small, neat form. I never saw her drag a married man into a recess at a political meeting and ravish him on a pile of electoral reform leaflets. If she is debauched then I am the devil herself. But Truss had the courage and ambition to enter British politics. I did not."

"The danger this new captain faces is not that she will be ousted by her MPs, but that any loss of authority will make her difficult job impossible. If her first week brings any sense of economic events spiralling out of control ... or of the No 10 operation being no more cohesive than the last one, then MPs will rebel more frequently, foreign leaders will make agreements less easily and millions of voters will look to other parties more eagerly."

"After the mini-budget we were going at breakneck speed and I said, you know, we should slow down, slow down. She said, "Well, I've only got two years" and I said, "You will have two months if you carry on like this". And that is, I'm afraid, what happened."

"10 Downing Street for a meeting with Liz Truss to discuss the issue of childcare. I like Liz, but she doesn’t listen very much, and when people try to make points, she just talks straight over them in a slightly irritating and rather 'deaf' way. Once she's made up her mind, she switches into full auto-drive mode. While Liz was in one of her long descriptions of how her policy should work and why it was better than all the other options, I happened to glance up onto the wall behind her, and there looking down on us was a portrait of Margaret Thatcher. Liz Truss is, in fact, like a young Margaret Thatcher on speed, and either she's going to shoot straight to the top of the Cabinet or she's going to overdo it and blow up entirely. I think it will be the former but we'll have to see."

"The pandemic, explained the Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson, was the definitive ‘end of the neoliberal era inaugurated by Thatcher and Reagan’. We don’t just hear that from Social Democrats these days. Now right-wing populists, journalists and economists also claim that ‘the Reagan/Thatcher era is over’. These two leaders are often used as symbols of the era of economic liberalization in the early 1980s, and I agree that it feels an awful lot like that era has come to an end. Donald Trump’s advisor Stephen Moore declared that the Republicans are no longer Reagan’s party but Trump’s, and that’s exactly how the party comes across in their recent agitation against free trade, immigration and tech companies, not to mention lies about election fraud. (Reagan once called the peaceful transfer of power the ‘magic’ of the free world.) Thatcher’s Tories have abandoned the European single market she was once instrumental in developing, and have simultaneously abandoned many other economic orthodoxies, toying with more active industrial policies and ‘Buy British’ slogans – a new attitude that Boris Johnson in an unguarded moment happened to summarize as ‘fuck business’. His short-lived successor, Liz Truss, who famously declared that large-scale imports of cheese were ‘a disgrace’, tried to invoke the Iron Lady, albeit through her boldness rather than her policies. Instead, Truss railed against the ‘consensus of the Treasury, of economists, with the Financial Times’ that budgets should be balanced and went on to doom her premiership with a massive, unfunded package of energy subsidies and tax cuts, which markets refused to finance."

"[Observing her speech at the PopCon conference in February 2024] It turns out the country is in the grip of a debilitating form of groupthink, all the more pernicious for being a combination of ideology and lifestyle choice. The ideology is what she calls communism – by which she seems to mean state interference in the free market coupled with weaponised identity politics."

"As she says it, she sounds as if she believes it, which presumably she has to, or else she wouldn't be here but would instead be serving out her penance in a soup kitchen somewhere. As I listened to her banging on, her eyes oddly glassy as though looking for something just over the horizon, she strongly reminded me of someone but I couldn’t put my finger on who it was. Then it came to me. In her mix of utter conviction and utter obliviousness to how she might come across to anyone who doesn’t see the world the way she does, the politician she most resembles is Jeremy Corbyn."

"Truss believes in the wisdom of the markets. It is the unaccountable power of quangos, civil servants and law courts she fundamentally mistrusts. So what caused the banks and the currency exchanges to turn against her? Are they communists, too?"

"Back in our tutorials, Truss demonstrated an unnerving ability to surprise. No other student matched her mischievous ability to read out essays on any number of the main events in British political history which always managed to say something new; not always accurate, but definitely new. These essays were creative and self-consciously unconventional. As we argued over the hour, she almost never backed down, even when I did what all Oxford tutors try to do and present fact after fact to try to change her mind."

"Make no mistake - a third, short runway will not be a long-term solution to our country's hub capacity question that we currently face. Britain ... deserves a much longer-term aviation plan than it has had in the past."

"The recent outbreak of violence in Rakhine state has forced tens of thousands of people to flee their homes. Many are living without basic water and sanitation. We must act now to relieve the immediate suffering and to ensure that conditions do not worsen to cause further loss of life. British aid will provide emergency sanitation, clean water, healthcare and nutrition to those affected by this terrible violence. But Britain cannot do this alone and we call on other donor countries to join in this relief operation."

"Women and children are vulnerable to brutal violence and some have lost everything... We cannot ignore what is happening to the Syrian people"

"Free movement of labour was never meant to be an unqualified principle, irrespective of how it might have worked on the ground. We do need to see action taken in relation to negotiation with the EU. [The government is] taking a fundamental look at some of the rules that allow unrestricted immigration."

"I want us to stay in the EU so that future generations can continue to benefit from the influence and prosperity that comes from our membership of the single market. The alternative, Brexit, would see our young people's prospects knocked sideways by an economic shock and years of uncertainty."

"Today's a good day to say I'm in a happy same sex relationship, I campaigned for Stronger In but sometimes you're better off out!"

"Local areas who want more grammar places should be able to have them and similarly, local areas who want to stick with the existing schools that they're happy with will be able to do that too."

"I represent a very young constituency here in London. The bottom line is that looking ahead, if Brexit doesn't work for young people in our country in the end it will not be sustainable. When they take their place here they will seek to improve or undo what we've done and make it work for them. So we do absolutely have a duty in this House to look ahead and ensure that whatever we get is sustainable and works for them."

"I think people need to get behind her [Theresa May]. I think she is doing an important job for our country. We need to support her in that impossible, almost, task that she has negotiating Brexit."

"We'll be dragging Remain voters out of the EU for a deal that means still complying with many EU rules, but now with no say on shaping them. It's not what they want, and on top of that when they hear that Leave voters are unhappy, they ask, 'What's the point?' For Leavers, this deal simply does not deliver the proper break from the European Union that they wanted."

"I don't think I would be able to stay part of a party that was simply a Brexit party that had crashed us out of the European Union."

"You can't pick & choose on human rights and equality. Children should understand a modern and diverse Britain they're growing up in."

"The party has now vacated the position of natural party of government. In today’s refashioned political landscape, they are perhaps no longer even the natural party of opposition."

"Unless a future Conservative party has some authentic purpose, there will be no future for it."

"In recent months she had begun to pick more of a One Nation way through the post-Gove, post-Brexit, post-election rubble. Unlike previous ministers, she was prepared to talk to the trade unions, was consulting on strengthening teacher qualifications and a new sex education curriculum, and only last week announced a modest budget to promote literacy programmes for disadvantaged students. However, her fate may have been sealed by her scepticism over free schools and the determined promotion of her own “social mobility action plan” (the Tories just will not give up on this jaded term) proposals publicly rubbished by [[w:Nick Timothy|[Nick] Timothy]] in the Sun. In the days and hours running up to her departure, support for Greening within the educational world was surprisingly strong. There was a real anger at the idea that Toby Young might stay and she would go – and not just because of the journalist’s long history of sexist tweets. Unlike Young and numerous others of his ilk, Greening is a Tory who is, at least, prepared to listen rather than lecture, to carefully consider rather than constantly broadcast their own views on everything under the educational sun."

"Politicians have a responsibility to give effect to the result of the last referendum"

"The bill has wide cross-party support and is backed by members who have very different views on how the matter of Brexit should be concluded. What unites us is a conviction that there is no mandate for no deal and the consequences for the economy and the country would be highly damaging."

"What he did object to was going back to the position of 1906 to 1914, that [sic] everybody was preparing for a war against Germany. We might eventually be driven to it, but we were not, in his opinion, yet at that point."

"As things are now, India is not in a position to defend itself. A great part of the defence of India is dependent on British Imperial troops."

"Either we should have to make a futile protest, which would irritate Mussolini and perhaps drive him out of the League into the arms of Germany, or we should make no protest at all and give the appearance of pusillanimity."

"He had been left with the opinion that there would be a wave of public opinion against the Government if it repudiated its obligations under Article 16 [of the Covenant of the League of Nations]... It was abundantly clear that the only safe line for His Majesty's Government was to try out the regular League of Nations procedure."

"British public opinion was solidly behind the League when it was founded... The British people supported the League for no selfish motive. They had seen the old system of alliances unable to prevent a world war. As practical men and women they wished to find a more effective instrument for peace. After four years of devastation they were determined to do their utmost to prevent another such calamity falling not only on themselves but upon the whole world. They were determined to throw the whole weight of their strength into the scales of international peace and international order. They were deeply and genuinely moved by a great ideal. It is the fashion sometimes in the world of to-day—a foolish fashion like many others in the world of to-day—to scoff at such ideals. What is the use, say the modern critics, of collective action when individual strength is simpler and swifter to apply, and more direct in its appeal to national sentiment? What is the good of working for peace when the whole history of the world shows that war is the only way of settling great issues? These questions ring every day in our ears. The day to day events of recent history have made it impossible for us to ignore the strength of the argument behind them. None the less, in spite of the grim experiences of the past, in spite of the worship of force in the present, the British people have clung to their ideal and they are not prepared to abandon it."

"It is...necessary when the League is in a time of real difficulty for the representative of the United Kingdom to state his view and to make it as clear as he can, first, that his Majesty's Government and the British people maintain their support of the League and its ideals as the most effective way of ensuring peace; and, secondly, that this belief in the necessity for preserving the League is our sole interest in the present controversy. No selfish or imperialist motives enter into our minds at all."

"On behalf of his Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom I can say that they will be second to none in their intention to fulfil, within the measure of their capacity, the obligations which the Covenant lays upon them. The ideas enshrined in the Covenant, and in particular the aspiration to establish the rule of law in international affairs, have appealed...with growing force to the strain of idealism which has its place in our national character, and they have become a part of our national conscience."

"It is in accordance with what we believe to be the underlying principles of the League that our people have steadily promoted, and still promote, the growth of self-government in their own territories. It was, for example, only a few weeks ago that I was responsible for helping to pass through the Imperial Parliament a great and complicated measure for extending self-government in India. Following this same line of thought we believe that small nations are entitled to a life of their own and to such protection as can collectively be afforded to them in the maintenance of their national life. We believe, on the undoubted evidence of past and present times, that all nations alike have a valuable contribution to make to the common stock of humanity. And we believe that backward nations are without prejudice to their independence and integrity, entitled to expect that assistance will be afforded them by more advanced peoples in the development of their resources and the building up of their national life. I am not ashamed of our record in this respect, and I make no apology for stating it here."

"The attitude of his Majesty's Government has been one of unwavering fidelity to the League and all that it stands for, and the case now before us is no exception, but, on the contrary, the continuance of that rule. The recent response of public opinion shows how completely the nation supports the Government in the full acceptance of the obligations of League membership, which is the oft proclaimed keynote of its foreign policy... In conformity with its precise and explicit obligations the League stands, and my country stands with it, for the collective maintenance of the Covenant in its entirety, and particularly for steady and collective resistance to all acts of unprovoked aggression. The attitude of the British nation in the last few weeks has clearly demonstrated the fact that this is no variable and unreliable sentiment, but a principle of international conduct to which they and their Government hold with firm, enduring, and universal persistence."

"A great proportion of the expenditure on Naval Defence is required to meet our Imperial, as distinct from our United Kingdom, obligations. The question must occur to all of us whether this little island can continue to shoulder the financial strain involved in maintaining, to so great an extent, the requisite standard of naval strength to ensure our Imperial security. It may well be that the safety of the British Commonwealth of Nations will depend on increased naval support from the Dominions."

"In Great Britain, the early months of 1935 witnessed an intensification of the partisan battle. The Left continued to clamour for disarmament. The insignificant increase of £4 millions in the Service Estimates, carefully explained and justified in a White Paper of March 5, brought down upon the Government a barrage of Opposition abuse. Herbert Morrison, for instance, whose party had just withdrawn the L.C.C. grant from the School Cadet Corps, declared in Bermondsey on March 13 that: "Toryism as represented by the National Government had resumed its historic role as the party of militarism and aggressive armaments." Even so open-minded and balanced a Liberal as Lothian was writing in The Times on March 11 in support of the German claim for equality and describing the inoffensive phrases in the White Paper as "an inadvertent carry over from pre-equality days.""

"[A] hymn of praise went up in response to the speech that Hitler made in the Reichstag on May 21 [1935]. In it he declared himself to be a man of peace who would faithfully carry out Germany's international obligations... The effect was exactly what he intended. All the pacifist forces in Great Britain were at once mobilised against the Government's rearmament proposals. The Parliamentary Labour Party immediately decided to vote against the air programme, and, backed by the Trade Union Congress and the National Executive of the Party, demanded a special international conference to take advantage of Hitler's magnificent offer. The religious leaders in the country were equally insistent that we should welcome with open arms Hitler's approach. Archbishop Temple and Dean Inge were for once found to be in agreement. "Hitler," wrote the Archbishop in The Times, "has made in the most deliberate manner offers which are a great contribution to the secure establishment of peace." "What an admirable letter!" responded the Dean three days afterwards. When Baldwin ventured to say a word of caution and to point out that the collective security of peace was still endangered by the absence of four Great Powers from the League, Herbert Morrison, using a metaphor that subsequently created an unfortunate precedent for Chamberlain, declared to the Fabian Society on May 24 that "The Government had either lost the boat or was in danger of losing it, and that Baldwin had missed the opportunity for a big, inspiring and mighty gesture.""

"I was amazed by his ambitions; I admired his imagination; I shared his ideals; I stood in awe of his intellectual capacity. But I was never touched by his humanity. He was the coldest fish with whom I have ever had to deal."

"He had a very sharp mind, along with a sharpness of facial outline that reflected his primly precise manner—which prompted "F. E.", Lord Birkenhead, with devastating aptness to describe him as "the last of a long line of maiden aunts". He also had an irritating mannerism of interjecting "Yes, yes" at short intervals in any conversation."

"Hoare himself was a man who commanded at that time respect, if not affection. He had always proved an efficient Minister and, although his precise and rather mincing form of speech was uninspiring, his actual performances had been of a high Parliamentary order. In conducting the proposals for Indian reform over a long period—nearly four years—he had withstood the attacks both of the Right and the Left. Faced with the formidable and persistent opposition of Churchill and his friends, he had nevertheless brought his measure to a successful conclusion, with infinite patience and considerable courage. At a later stage in the pre- and post-Munich period, he degenerated intellectually and morally, and became one of the worst and most sycophantic of Neville Chamberlain's advisers. But in December 1935 it seemed inconceivable how he had fallen into so grave an error of judgement and of tactics as to put his name to so dangerous a document [the Hoare–Laval Pact]. The true explanation is that he was following, consciously or unconsciously, a double policy—of the League on the one hand, and of appeasement of Italy on the other. Such a dualism was self-contradictory and bound to lead to disaster. He was certainly in a low state of health when he left for his holiday, and unfit for business—especially with so tricky a customer as Laval. His accident in Switzerland could not have been more unfortunately timed, for he was prevented from returning immediately the storm began to gather. Yet, since Hoare was a man of modest stature and a certain prim correctness of speech and behaviour, even his misfortunes had something ridiculous about them. Middle-aged Foreign Secretaries should not go skating; and there were naturally endless witticisms about the thinness of the ice on which he had chosen to practise his skill at this particular crisis."

"[Nine Troubled Years] revives the half-forgotten impression that Sir Samuel Hoare was the most complacent and fatuous, even the most detestable, of the four Appeasers."

"I am sorry to hear of the increasing friction between Hindus and Muhammedans in the N.W.F.P. and the Punjab. One hardly knows what to wish for; unity of ideas and action would be very dangerous politically, divergence of ideas and collision are administratively troublesome. Of the two the latter is the least risky, though it throws anxiety and responsibility upon those on the spot where the friction exists."

"We get very complacent about the state of our democracy. We think that because we’ve got parliament, and people get elected, that’s the democracy box ticked. It’s not."

"No, I’m not going on Strictly. I won't dance. Don't ask me. Our primary job is running the country. We've got to a state now where most of us are more fixated on our two-minute clip on Twitter than a sustained, nuanced argument."

"[On the damage done to politician's public reputation by the actions of MPs such as Boris Johnson] We've gone from 45 per cent of people thinking we're all terrible and lying all the time to 80 per cent. That is really problematic. Government is by consent and if the people no longer think that, in the main, parliament is there to defend their rights and freedoms, then the danger is they'll go, "What is the point of democracy?" It's easy for someone to say it's a lot more efficient to just have someone in charge. Why bother with getting things through the House? Why bother with persuading people? That’s the danger."

"Gordon's journals are splendid, I delight in an eccentric man upsetting the odds which routine, formality, "Foreign" and other offices always have on their side, and making the latter appear ridiculous."

"I must say that in my judgment Swinburne's claims are immeasurably superior to those of any Englishman now living... Please read in the Volume I send, published two years ago, the 'Seamew,' the 'Jacobite's Exile,' the 'Threnody on Inchbold,' and 'The Commonweal,' his Jubilee Ode, and then consider whether any can touch him as a Poet. I believe that in the long run Public opinion will be more shocked by his neglect than by his recognition."

"It would be hard to imagine anyone less like a professional politician than George Wyndham, either in his appearance or in his outlook on the world. In political cartoons he was sometimes shewn as a typical guardsman, but here again the target was missed. He seemed to belong to a less specialised age than our own, when men developed many sides of their nature at once, and it was more possible than it is today for one man to express himself in a single life as a statesman, a soldier, and an artist; there was an element of all these in Wyndham, and the artist in him was in frequent revolt against the routine of the statesman. At my first meeting with him, and even more when I stayed with him, I felt that he had little in common with a world of mass-production and centralised business; it would not be difficult to imagine him in one of Marlborough's campaigns advancing to greet the enemy and courteously offering the first shot in the battle to the other side, but to many of his friends this chivalrous and generous figure seemed to belong to an earlier period and to have leapt suddenly, armed with sword and pen, out of the mists of the Middle Ages."

"It suited him better to write a verse, hunt a fox and sit talking with his friends into the early hours, and he was one of those rare people who rise from their beds to watch the dawn. His days were crowded with physical and mental energies. The vowel-sounds and rhythms of Shakespeare's sonnets, the song of Roland, the water supply of the prehistoric men of the downs, the fortifications of Maiden Castle, or the result of the latest manœuvres on Salisbury plain, were all subjects which fell within the range of his talk; this interest in a multitude of problems of literature, soldiering or archaeology was not detached but always eager and pursuing, as though the quarry lay a short way in front of the hunter."

"Lord Pembroke and George Wyndham were the handsomest of the Souls."

"As a fact, the one Front-Bench man who seemed in the days of my youth still eternally young was for me, in those days, on the opposite Front-Bench. The wonderful thing about George Wyndham was that he had come through political life without losing his political opinions, or indeed any of his opinions. Precisely what gave him such a genius for friendship was that life had left in him so much of himself; so much of his youth; so much even of his childhood."

"Wyndham was enthusiastic, he was a Romantic, he was an Imperialist, and he was quite naturally a literary pupil of W. E. Henley. Wyndham was a scholar, but his scholarship is incidental; he was a good critic, within the range allowed him by his enthusiasms; but it is neither as Scholar nor as Critic that we can criticize him. We can criticize his writings only as the expression of this peculiar English type, the aristocrat, the Imperialist, the Romantic, riding to hounds across his prose, looking with wonder upon the world as upon a fairyland."

"[H]e had been in high favour with Balfour, although the rank and file had never cottoned to his dandified and over-polished parliamentary manners, which led one Tory member to mutter in my hearing, after one of Wyndham's Burke-conscious perorations, "Damn that fellow; he pirouettes like a dancing master.""

"[I] felt it was important as a Muslim to lend my voice to this fight against antisemitism. We have only ever defeated intolerance when we have come together. Antisemitism will only stop when all of us, whatever faith we belong to or none – oppose it and challenge it."

"I'm really, really hesitant about making this Sayeeda v the Tory party."

"There is a lot of emotional attachment here. It's like a really painful divorce. It does feel like I'm in an abusive relationship at the moment, where I'm with somebody that I really shouldn't be with. It’s not healthy for me to be there any more with the Conservative party."

"[On Sajid Javid] He's chancellor of the exchequer. He's got the second or third most powerful role in government and he still doesn't feel like he can exercise power? I get this art of playing politics to get to a position where you're increasingly more powerful … but I think that politicians are so focused on amassing power that they forget about what they're amassing it for."

"Of course he should. If you can't call racism racism, if you can't call antisemitism antisemitism, and if you can't call Islamophobia Islamophobia, then how are we going to fix it?"

"Every day before we start parliamentary business in the Commons and Lords we say a prayer and praise God – we say our parliamentary version of Allahu Akbars at the heart of democracy – a process Robert Jenrick is a part of. This language from Jenrick is more of his usual nasty divisive rhetoric."

"It is with a heavy heart that I have today informed my whip and decided for now to no longer take the Conservative whip. This is a sad day for me. I am a Conservative and remain so but sadly the current party are far removed from the party I joined and served in Cabinet. My decision is a reflection of how far right my party has moved and the hypocrisy and double standards in its treatment of different communities."

"Reform is not the answer at this election. Their plans are not based in reality. Cut £50 billion a year from public services? Independent observers have explained that the sums don't add up."

"Because whether it's Labour, Reform, or the Lib Dems – votes for these pie-in-the-sky parties is a vote for La La Land fantasy politics which will only take the country backwards. And we cannot afford that."

"I have been very critical of police in the past, particularly around the attitude of some police forces to the protests we saw since [the Hamas attack on Israel on] 7 October [2023]. I thought it was quite wrong that somebody could shout 'Allahu Akbar' on the streets of London and not be immediately arrested; project genocidal chants on to Big Ben and not be immediately arrested. That attitude is wrong and I'll always call out the police for it."

"We need to make Reform redundant by restoring the Conservatives' credibility on immigration and exposing Reform's fantasy economics."

"I want this country to be the most welcoming country in the world for Israelis and for the Jewish community. And a small thing that I fought for when I was the immigration minister was to ensure that every Israeli citizen could enter our country through the e-gate, through the easy access. So that at every airport and point of entry to our great country there is the Star of David there as a symbol that we support Israel, we stand with Israel. We are friends and allies of Israel, and Israelis are welcome in our country."

"Our special forces are killing rather than capturing terrorists because our lawyers tell us that if they are caught, the European court will set them free."

"I have sacked Robert Jenrick from the shadow cabinet, removed the whip and suspended his party membership with immediate effect. I was presented with clear, irrefutable evidence that he was plotting in secret to defect in a way designed to be as damaging as possible to his shadow cabinet colleagues and the wider Conservative party. The British public are tired of political psychodrama and so am I. They saw too much of it in the last government, they're seeing too much of it in THIS government. I will not repeat those mistakes."

"The legislation was finally added to the Digital Economy Bill (now the Digital Economy Act) by a last-minute Government amendment following a long-running campaign by ALCS and SoA. We work from the basic position that creators should be rewarded for their work. If they are not, then they may decide not to create any more, which would be seriously bad news for the UK economy. It is estimated that our creative industries generate £8 million every single hour and that, by 2018, the annual figure will be £100 billion. Writers are at the very heart of this. Books, film, television, even computer games: where would any of these be without writers?"

"As I said earlier, we believe that writers should be rewarded for their work. PLR is not a huge income stream for most authors: it amounts to 7.82p per loan and is subject to an annual cap of £6,600 per recipient. However, writers will tell you that they find it extremely gratifying to know their books are being read and this provides a source of encouragement for them to continue writing. Writers, illustrators, photographers, translators and editors are also eligible for PLR. The Government has now guaranteed that an annual fund of £6.6 million will be made available for PLR up to 2019."

"With the development of e-books, we have long thought that PLR should be extended to the remote lending of e-books by public libraries. Previously, writers received no recognition at all of the value of their work to the public consumption and enjoyment of literature through e-books. To achieve our aim, it would require legislation. We therefore set about the task of lobbying Government ministers and both Houses of Parliament to persuade them there was a need for the moral rights of writers to be acknowledged in the age of developing technology which had facilitated the remote public lending of e-books."

"The new arrangements will officially take effect from 1 July 2018, and any payments arising from the newly eligible loans will be made in February 2020."

"The great thing is that remote e-book loans will receive the same PLR rate per loan as print titles and audio titles, and the terms for receiving PLR will also remain the same."

"We have been lucky to be supported by so many members of both Houses of Parliament, and Government ministers too. The Rt Hon John Whittingdale MP, former Culture Secretary, and the former Creative Industries Minister, the Rt Hon Ed Vaizey MP, deserve thanks for all their efforts to make this happen. So too does Lord Clement-Jones, who helped to move an earlier amendment in the House of Lords, and has worked tirelessly to help us on this and many other issues of concern to writers; and Baroness Tessa Jowell, who has been a valuable source of advice. Also members of the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, particularly Paul Farrelly MP, and current chair, Damian Collins MP. Kevin Brennan MP also helped tremendously. But it would be remiss of me not to mention especially the late Baroness (Ruth) Rendell, who served as secretary of the All Party Writers Group for many years and was always ready to wade in on our behalf. And finally, Dr Jim Parker, former head of UK PLR and now coordinator of PLR International."

"The All Party Writers Group has 61 members now, across both Houses of Parliament and all political parties, including many published writers. It is an invaluable source of support to enable us to speak up for writers, and ensure they are properly rewarded for their work and that their concerns are brought to the attention of those who can make a difference on their behalf."

"There will always be more work to be done. We are currently turning our attention to unfair contracts for writers and trying to make sure that writers are aware of their rights and how to ensure they are enforced. As the mother-in-law of a successful published writer, I am well aware of the need to campaign on this!"

"As a former minister in the Department of Culture, Media & Sport, I would like the Department to be taken more seriously across government. It tends to be regarded as a small, and relatively inconsequential, government department. Nothing could be further from the truth. It deals with issues that directly affect everyone’s quality of life. The enjoyment of literature and the wider contribution of the creative industries generally is central to that. We will continue to stand up and campaign for that on behalf of the creative industries, but, in particular for the 90,000 writer members of ALCS."

"Janet Anderson is a former MP for Rossendale and Darwen, as well as a former Minister in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). She chaired the All Party Parliamentary Writers Group from 2009 – 2010 and is currently assisting ALCS in our lobbying activities."