"[H]e had small taste for theorising, and did not set out to be a political thinker in any large or systematic sense. Yet his fundamental feelings and beliefs, if they were never consciously organised into a political philosophy, were necessarily prime determinants of his political action. Moreover, they represent very well an important strain of Conservative thought. It is not, despite large elements in common and a virtual identity of practical outcome, typical Toryism: Salisbury was too utilitarian, too lacking in reverence for authority, prescription, and tradition, too cynical and pessimistic perhaps, for that. It is an intellectual and sophisticated Toryism, which employs an apparatus of close empirical reasoning to support the conclusions at which it is programmed by instinctive predilection to arrive. It is, or desires to be, a clear, hard, logical creed, realistic and sceptical, seeking an argumentative basis for resistance to radical change not in the sentimental or mystical idealisation but in the rational justification of the existing order. It is, in short, Toryism for the clever man."
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Prime Ministers of the United KingdomPoliticians from EnglandAnglicans from the United KingdomUniversity of Oxford facultyConservative Party (UK) politicians
Original Language: English
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Paul Smith, Lord Salisbury on Politics: A Selection From His Articles in the Quarterly Review, 1860-1883 (1972), pp. 2-3
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_Gascoyne-Cecil%2C_3rd_Marquess_of_Salisbury
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Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (3 February 1830 – 22 August 1903), styled Lord Robert Cecil before the death of his elder brother in 1865, and Viscount Cranborne from June 1865 until his father died in April 1868, was a three-time Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, during 1885–1886, 1886–1892 and 1895–1902.
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