"It was pleasant and interesting to be in almost daily intercourse with a friend with whom I had much in common, and whose conversation, when he was in the humour for it, was most agreeable to listen to. But he was not always in the humour, for, as his Parliamentary Under-Secretary, J. E. Ellis, said to me in describing him, he was "a man of moods." No truer word was ever spoken, and he had his bad days as well as his good ones. These variations in his temperature were naturally inconvenient, and made him less pleasant as a chief than he ought to have been: he was charming, but there was a sense of insecurity. Of all the Secretaries of State under whom I served he was the most intellectually brilliant, and, though he took to politics rather late in life, he had speedily raised himself to a conspicuous position; but he certainly was, in my opinion, born to be a thinker and a writer rather than a practical statesman and administrator."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Academics from EnglandMembers of the Parliament of the United KingdomEditors from EnglandChief Secretaries for IrelandSecretaries of State for India (United Kingdom)
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Lord Kilbracken, Reminiscences of Lord Kilbracken (1931), pp. 183-184
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Morley%2C_1st_Viscount_Morley_of_Blackburn
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn
111 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn →
Related Quotes
"I have not read it, and I don't intend to read it. It's not worth the paper it's written on. To the end of time it'll…"
"As for progress, what signs of it are there now? And all we Victorians believed in it from the Utilitarians onwards."
"Censorship...ought to be confined to the temporary suppression of military and naval news which might assist the enem…"
"A mirage, and an old one... One may as well talk of London morality being due to the Archbishop of Canterbury. But ta…"
"This inner conflict between the man of letters and the man of politics in Morley pursued and paralysed him all throug…"
"Liberalism, as we have known it, is dead beyond resurrection."
"The decrepitude that ended in the Latin conquest of Constantinople at the beginning of the thirteenth century, and th…"
"I was always opposed to the Anglo-Russian agreement—so was Kitchener. Who stands most to gain out of this war? Russia…"
"I'm sick of Wilson ... He hailed the Russian Revolution six months ago as the new Golden Age, and I said to Page, “Wh…"
"There are some books which cannot be adequately reviewed for twenty or thirty years after they come out."