"Mr. Pitt, like other men, had his errors; and the country is still smarting for them. But I cannot refer even to the errors of so great a man without avowing my respect and veneration for his memory. [A Laugh.] Sir, I am under no obligation to profess such a sentiment; it is our right and duty to read the characters of public men in the light of history; but I say simply, because it is the truth, that I look with sincere and profound respect upon the political character and the genius of Mr. Pitt."

"I am certain that, up to the very last, it was Pitt's determination to have kept clear from the European wars consequent on the French Revolution. Nothing was more unjust than the charge constantly brought against him that he did not do all that a patriotic minister could do to preserve peace. His personal interests and predilections were all in favour of peace, and nothing but the outrageous conduct of the French compelled him to take part in the war, which no English minister could have long avoided, unless by joining the French in their onslaught upon all the old governments in Europe."

"No one who really knew Pitt intimately would have called him cold. A man who is Prime Minister at twenty-six, cannot carry his heart on his sleeve and be "Hail, fellow! well met," with every Jack, Tom, and Harry. Pitt's manner by nature, as well as by habit and necessity, was in public always dignified, reserved, and imperious; but he had very warm feelings and, had it not been for the obligations of the official position, which lay on him almost throughout his whole life, I believe he might have had nearly as many personal friends as Fox."

"[O]ur reverence for the memory of that statesman, to whom it is, in our opinion, mainly owing that those institutions are still preserved to us, and that the continuance of that policy is still within our power; that these nations now enjoy the blessings of domestic tranquillity, and that what remains of independent Europe is now leaning with confidence upon our aid... [T]hat great minister, who united in himself, beyond the example of all former ministers, the confidence of his fellow-subjects with the favour of his sovereign... [T]hose stupendous talents, of which even the most ordinary exercise was a source of wonder and delight; which resembled, in the mightiness of their force, the elementary powers of nature, and in the truth and precision of their movement, the most exquisite process of art."

"Impossible, impossible; one feels as if there was something missing in the world—a chasm, a blank that cannot be supplied."

"I have been this morning with Lady Hester Pitt, and there is little William Pitt, not eight years old, and really the cleverest child I ever saw, and brought up so strictly and so proper in his behaviour, that, mark my words, that little boy will be a thorn in Charles's side as long as he lives."

"What I have found remarkably agreeable in any conversation I have had with Mr. Pitt on business is not only the extreme quickness of his apprehension but the undivided and unprejudiced attention which he gives."

"[W]ith that last breath expired the last hopes of this country... [I]t is deprived of the services of such a man whose like we shall never look upon again."

"He created a plebeian aristocracy and blended it with the patrician oligarchy. He made peers of second-rate squires and fat graziers. He caught them in the alleys of Lombard Street, and clutched them from the counting-houses of Cornhill."

"Were the Tories inimical to national improvement when under Pitt they first applied philosophy to commerce, and science to finance; when under their auspices the most severe retrenchment was practised in every department of the public expenditure; when a bill for the Commutation of Tithes was not only planned but printed; and when nothing but the violence of the French Revolution prevented the adoption of a matured scheme of Ecclesiastical Reform, which would not have left our revolutionary oligarchs a single pretext to veil their present plundering purpose? Why! the cry of Parliamentary Reform was first raised by a Tory minister, struggling against the bigoted and corrupt authority of the Whig oligarchy."

"His reputation has suffered both from hero-worship, which skimmed over the contradictions of his character, and from denigration, which was oblivious to its complexities. He remains an enigma, for his correspondence does not abound in those flashes of exuberant self-revelation which make Charles Fox and Edmund Burke so vivid and compelling. But the stabilisation of British economy after the American War, the reform of the customs, the pruning of wasteful expenditure, the restoration of national self-respect, and the courageous defence of English and European liberties threatened by an absolutism more powerful than the old, constitute an enduring claim to fame."

"I will only here sum up what I have to say to those Tory gentlemen who belong to what are called Pitt Clubs, that the two most formidable objects of their apprehensions, Parliamentary Reform and Catholic Emancipation, were the measures of Mr. Pitt."

"To all appearance, indeed, the better part of the work achieved by Chatham was in ruins. Its restoration, so far as restoration was now possible, was the task which lay before his son. He brought to it great gifts of intellect and character—a swift comprehensive mind, eloquence, patience, unbending courage, intense devotion to his country, and, most useful of all, a capacity to face facts as they are and to shape policy in accordance with the lessons of experience."

"But did he live or die a Tory? Ehrman is surely right to answer no. Pitt called himself a Whig. His personal commitment to the Anglican Church and to the monarchy was limited. He took a utilitarian view of traditional institutions, ruthlessly transforming them when necessary. In an ideal world, he thought Tom Paine was right. He was conservative only in his conviction that an ideal world was unattainable and that property should be preserved. Only after his death was a renovated Tory party forged, with him as a crucial part of its mythology."

"Time and again he showed a rare sense of what was due to the occasion. With astonishing magnanimity he forebore to reveal Charles James Fox's involvement in an intrigue with the Russian court in 1790, traversing ministerial policy, which by any standard came near to the verge of a treasonable misdemeanour and gives a lamentable impression of Fox's flawed political integrity. When a bad harvest sent bread prices rocketing Pitt plunged into state trading in grain – until Parliament imposed its veto. In these and other ways...the liberal impulses in Pitt's mind survived against revolution after 1790. And this was also true of foreign affairs... Even under the stress of war the Pittite circle preserved its sympathy for the idea of French constitutional monarchy, was not averse to seeing those elements that were of value salvaged from the Revolution of 1789 and...hung back from any endorsement of the Bourbon princes' demands for a return to the pre-revolutionary regime."

"He was far too practical a politician to be given to abstract theories, universal doctrines, watchwords, or shibboleths of any kind. He knew of no political gospel that was to be preached in season and out of season alike. When he thought reform wholesome, he proposed it: when he ceased to think it wholesome, he ceased to propose it. Whether his memory would be claimed by Reformers or anti-Reformers was a question upon which he troubled himself very little. In the same way he urged Catholic Emancipation, even at the cost of power, when he judged that the balance of advantages was on its side. He abandoned it with equal readiness as soon as the King's strong resistance and the necessity of avoiding intestine division in the face of foreign peril had placed the balance of advantage on the other side. The same untheoretical mind may be traced in all his legislation. The great merit of his measures, so far as they had a trial, was that they were admirably calculated to attain the object they had in view, with the least possible damage to the interests which any great change must necessarily affect. Their demerit was, if demerit it be, that they were justifiable on no single theory, and were often marred by what seemed to be logical contradictions, which damaged them in argument, though they did not hinder them in practice."

"The greatest statesman of his century."

"In attacking France, Pitt preserved social order in England, and kept civilisation in the paths of that regular and gradual progress which it has followed ever since. He loved power not as an end but as a means."

"Here's to the Pilot that weather'd the Storm!"