"...ideas may be very dangerous things. There is no country in Europe that has a constitution comparable to ours. I do not mean by using that word "comparable" that I am assuming that ours is the best. I merely affirm that they have been all different; that there is no constitution like ours, which has evolved through the centuries into the constitution as we know it to-day. Therefore it is a more easy matter for ideas to sweep people off their feet in those countries. Throughout the whole of Russia, and of Germany and Italy, you have peoples numbering hundreds of millions who are governed by ideas alien to the ideas which we hold in this country. They are the ideas of Communism and of differing forms of Fascism. Now, whatever those ideas may produce for those countries, what I want to warn you about is that neither of those ideas can ever do anything to help our country in solving her own constitutional problems. They are exotic to this country. They are alien. You could not graft them on to our system any more than you could graft a Siberian crab on an oak."
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Prime Ministers of the United KingdomPoliticians from EnglandAcademics from EnglandAnglicans from the United KingdomConservative Party (UK) politicians
Original Language: English
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Speech to the Bewdley Unionist Association in Worcester (10 April 1937), quoted in Service of Our Lives (1937), pp. 100-101.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Stanley_Baldwin
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Stanley Baldwin
Stanley Baldwin, 1st Earl Baldwin of Bewdley KG PC (3 August 1867 β 14 December 1947) was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom on three separate occasions (1923β24, 1924β29 and 1935β37).
307 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Stanley Baldwin β
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