"Balfour's favourite weapon was the rapier, with no button on, without prejudice to a strong broadsword when it was wanted... His eye for the construction of dilemmas was incomparable, and... [h]e revelled in carrying logic all its length, and was not always above urging a weak point as if it were a strong one. Though polished and high-bred in air, he unceremoniously applied Dr. Johnson's cogent principle that to treat your adversary with respect is to give him an advantage to which he is not entitled. Of intellectual satire he was a master—when he took the trouble; for the moral irony that leaves a wound he happily had no taste, any more than he had a taste for that extremity in temper and language which was rather the fashion of leading men at the time. I still can find no better parallel to him than Macaulay's account of Halifax: "His understanding was keen, sceptical, inexhaustibly fertile in distinctions and objections, his taste refined, his sense of the ludicrous exquisite, his temper placid and forgiving, but fastidious, and by no means prone either to malevolence or to enthusiastic admiration.""
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Prime Ministers of the United KingdomUniversity of Cambridge facultyBritish peersPhilosophers from ScotlandPoliticians from Scotland
Original Language: English
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John Morley, Recollections, Volume I (1917), pp. 226-227
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Arthur_Balfour
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Arthur Balfour
Arthur James Balfour, 1st Earl of Balfour, KG, OM, PC (25 July 1848 – 19 March 1930) was a British Conservative statesman and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1902 until 1905. The author of several influential works of philosophy, he was one of the most intellectual prime ministers of the 20th century. As Foreign Secretary he authored the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which supported the establishment of a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine.
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