Members Of The Parliament Of The United Kingdom

"[A] return to more thrifty and economical administration [is] the first and paramount duty of the Government."

"Wonderful news to-day, and it is only a question of time when we shall sweep this country."

"[W]here we were obliged to part company with our friends was here—that we held and still hold that war was neither intended nor desired by the Government and the people of Great Britain, but that it was forced upon us without adequate reason, entirely against our will."

"[T]he rise of Germany into the front rank of the commercial Powers of the world was the most remarkable illustration that was to be found of the practical value of education, organization, and concentration. ... Any man who read the accounts of what was done and provided in France, Germany, Belgium, Austria, and, above all, the United States of America, and contrasted the magnificent educational apparatus in which the humblest boy in those countries might aspire to be a participant with our own scanty, slovenly, unscientific, and ill-organized system, or want of system, would no longer be at a loss to understand why England was handicapped in the race for commercial supremacy."

"So far from enjoying the undisputed hegemony which was so confidently predicted for British trade 50 years ago, there was not now an inch of ground in any one of the international markets for which we were not fighting with all our available strength. We had long ceased to enjoy that relative superiority in natural advantages with which we started upon the race."

"In 1851 Harriet Martineau had just published a...History of England during the Thirty Years' Peace. The Great Exhibition of 1851...was about to open its doors and inaugurate what many people regarded as a new era of international concord. Industry was to be the recruiting sergeant of the future, and war, with its unproductive expenditure, with its futile hatreds and animosities, was to be superseded by the bloodless revolution of free competitors in the open markets of the world. For success in that new and pacific international struggle no nation was so well equipped as our own. We started with enormous advantages. Fifty years had passed. How did we stand to-day? The civilized world, which in 1851 seemed to be in the mood to send in its swords to be beaten into ploughshares, was now transformed into an armed camp; the 30 years' peace which Miss Martineau described had been succeeded by 50 years of almost continuous war."

"[W]e claim to start from and to maintain in all our political action this fundamental principle—that the interests of the community as a whole ought to be paramount over the interests of any class, any interest, or any section which that community contains. That is the root and spring of Liberalism."

"I...say to my working-men friends here, before you forsake your support and allegiance to the Liberal party, and before you go trying to found some separate organization of your own, let me venture to put before you two considerations. In the first place I would beg of you to remember that in English public life and in English history we have hitherto always had parties which did not represent, or which, at any rate, did not profess to represent, particular classes, but which looked at the interests of the community from the point of view of the community as a whole."

"The severance of Ulster from the rest of Ireland is a geographical, and, therefore, a political impossibility. ... The Union is safe so long as Ulster is loyal."

"[A] party requires party spirit, and party spirit is the product of a very complex sentiment, which is slow to grow and hard to sustain, and which thrives best where it can be nourished by historic memories."

"The only solution for dealing with the IRA is to kill 600 people in one night."

"You cannot come here because you are not white."

"A few attempts have been made to argue that a Nazi victory over the Soviet Union might not have been wholly disadvantageous to the Western powers, and that therefore a second phase of appeasement after 1941 might have been preferable to continued war. Some British Tories, notably the late Alan Clark, have suggested that the British Empire might have been spared ignominious bankruptcy, decline and fall, had a separate peace been made along the lines Rudolf Hess seems to have envisaged and Hitler repeatedly mused about in his evening monologues; in a similar vein, some American conservatives argue that the Cold War might have been avoided had Roosevelt kept the United States out of the shooting war in Europe. On the whole, however, most writers have tended to take the view that a Nazi victory would have been a worse outcome than that of 1945. Even if a victorious Third Reich had opted for peace with Britain and America - which cannot be regarded as very probable - the price would have been horrendously high for the millions of people left under Nazi rule. All nine million of the Jews of Europe might have been murdered, rather than the nearly six million who actually were, to say nothing of the vast human suffering that would have been inflicted on other ethnic groups by the implementation of the Generalplan Ost, which envisaged deporting around fifty million East Europeans to Siberia."

"I am confirmed in my opinion that it is hopeless here. All we can do is arm the Orangemen – to the teeth – and get out."

"Pinkish toffs like Ian Gilmour] and Charlie Morrison], having suffered, for ten years, submission to their social inferior see in Michael [Heseltine] an arriviste, certainly, who can't shoot straight and in Jopling's damning phrase 'bought all his own furniture', but one who at any rate seeks the cachet. While all the nouves in the party think he (Michael) is the real thing."

"I want to fire the whole lot. Instantly. Out, out. No "District" commands, no golden bowlers, nothing. Out … If I could, I'd do what Stalin did to Tukhachevsky."

"I fell into conversation with Douglas. His is a split personality. À deux he is delightful; clever, funny, observant, drily cynical. But get him anywhere near "display mode", particularly if there are officials around, and he might as well have a corncob up his arse. Pompous, trite, high-sounding, cautiously guarded."

"John Pilger: I read that you were a vegetarian and you are seriously concerned about the way animals are killed. Alan Clark: Yeah. John Pilger: Doesn’t that concern extend to the way humans, albeit foreigners, are killed? Alan Clark: Curiously not."

""The trouble with [[w:Michael Heseltine|[Michael] Heseltine]] is that he had to buy all his furniture." Snobby, but cutting."

"I only can properly enjoy carol services if I am having an illicit affair with someone in the congregation. Why is this? Perhaps because they are essentially pagan, not Christian, celebrations."

"So what does it matter where it was when it was hit? We could have sunk it if it'd been tied up on the quayside in a neutral port and everyone would still have been delighted."

"I am not a fascist. Fascists are shopkeepers, I am a Nazi."

"Next, your enemies accuse me of a desire for the independence of Ireland. I admit the charge, and let them make the most of it. I have seen Ireland a kingdom; I reproach myself with having lived to behold her a province! Yes, I confess it—I will ever be candid upon the subject—I have an ulterior object—The Repeal of the Union, and the restoration to Old Ireland of her Independence. (Loud and repeated cheering, and acclamations for several minutes.)"

"The Protestant alone could not expect to liberate his country—the Roman Catholic alone could not do it—neither could the Presbyterian—but amalgamate the three into the Irishman, and the Union is repealed. Learn discretion from your enemies—they have crushed your country by fomenting religious discord—serve her by abandoning it for ever. Let each man give up his share of the mischief—let each man forsake every feeling of rancour. But, I say not this to barter with you, my countrymen—I require no equivalent from you—whatever course you shall take, my mind is fixed—I trample under foot the Catholic claims, if they can interfere with the Repeal; I abandon all wish for emancipation, if it delays that Repeal. Nay, were Mr. Perceval, to-morrow, to offer me the Repeal of the Union, upon the terms of re-enactment the entire penal code, I declare it from my heart, and in the presence of my God, that I would most cheerfully embrace his offer."

"It is to be found at once in the religious dissensions which the enemies of Ireland have created, and continued, and seek to perpetuate amongst ourselves, by telling us of, and separating us into wretched sections and miserable subdivisions; they separated the Protestant from the Catholic, and the Presbyterian from both; they revived every antiquated cause of domestic animosity, and they invented new pretexts of rancour; but above all, my countrymen, they belied and calumniated us to each other—they falsely declared that we hated each other, and they continued to repeat the assertion, until we came to believe it; they succeeded in producing all the madness of party and religious distinctions; and whilst we were lost in the stupor of insanity, they plundered us of our country, and left us to recover at our leisure from the horrid delusion into which we had been so artfully conducted."

"Let us show to Ireland that we have nothing in view but her good; nothing in our hearts but the desire of mutual forgiveness, mutual toleration, and mutual affection; in fine, let every man who feels with me proclaim that if the alternative were offered him of union, or the re-enactment of the penal code in all its pristine horrors, that he would prefer without hesitation the latter, as the lesser and more sufferable evil; that he would rather confide in the justice of his brethren, the Protestants of Ireland, who have already liberated him, than lay his country at the feet of foreigners."

"Good God! what a brute man becomes when ignorant and oppressed! Oh, Liberty, what horrors are perpetrated in thy name! May every virtuous revolutionist remember the horrors of Wexford!"

"I love liberty as conducive to increase the portion of human happiness. A great deal of the misery of man can clearly be derived from the form of government under which he lives. Oppression harasses his faculties. Privilege confined by accident insults his understanding."

"Moderation is the character of genuine patriotism, of that patriotism which seeks for the happiness of mankind. There is another species which is caused by hatred of oppression. This is a passion. The other is a principle."

"We talked some pure, because moderate, democracy. Hail, Liberty! How cheering is thy name! How happy should mankind be if thou wast universally diffused! Strange it might appear that thou shouldst be hateful to any. But thou art calumniated, as thou art disgraced by the nominal advocates. The interested, those who grow fat on the miseries of mankind, the tyrant, and the demagogue condemn thee. The one raises his voice aloud and is heard in the public places to declaim against thee; the other more effectually damns thee by his support."

"I feel, I really feel, the sacred and mild warmth of true patriotism. I will endeavour to make the narrow circle of my friends happy, I will endeavour to give cheerfulness and ease to the peasantry over whom I may command, I will endeavour to give liberty to my country, and I will endeavour to increase the portion of the knowledge and virtue of humankind."

"I love, from my heart I love, liberty. I do not express myself properly. Liberty is in my bosom less a principle than a passion. But I know that the victories of the French would be attended with bad consequences. The Irish people are not yet sufficiently enlightened to be able to bear the sun of freedom. Freedom would soon dwindle into licentiousness. They would rob; they would murder. The altar of liberty totters when it is cemented only with blood, when it is supported only with carcases. The liberty which I look for is that which would increase the happiness of mankind. In the service of this liberty I have devoted my life and whatever portion of talents I may have or acquire."

"I have finished Godwin. His work [Enquiry Concerning Political Justice] cannot be too highly praised. All mankind are indebted to the author. The cause of despotism never met a more formidable adversary. He goes to the root of every evil that now plagues man and degrades him almost beneath the savage beast. He shows the source whence all the misfortunes of mankind flow. That source he demonstrates to be political government."

"O'Connell, I think, is the first orator of the age—for his rare concentration of intellectual gifts. He is logical, profound, sarcastic, bitter, humourous, playful,—and has a masterly command of all the earnest and touching passions. I have heard him at least fifty times, and in every variety of question, and every new display gave me a higher opinion of his varied, astonishing, and exquisite powers."

"In public meetings in Ireland, he is so confident in his powers, that he gives himself little trouble in the selection of his materials, and generally trusts to his emotions for his harangues. He is, on that account, occasionally desultory and irregular. But there is no man more capable of lucid exposition, when he previously deliberates upon the order in which he should array the topics upon which he intends to dwell. He undertook, on this occasion [26 February 1825], the very laborious task of tracing the progress of the penal code, and epitomized in some measure the history of his country. For the first hour he was, perhaps, a little encumbered with small details; but when he advanced into the general consideration of the grievances under which the great body of the people are doomed to labor—when he painted the insolence of the dominant faction—when he showed the effects of the penal code brought to his own door—he seized with an absolute dominion upon the sympathies of his acclaiming auditors, and poured the full tide of his own emotions into their hearts... Many a big drop, compounded of heat and patriotism, of tears and of perspiration, stood upon the rude and honest faces that were cast in true Hibernian mould, and were raised toward the glory of Ireland with a mixed expression of wonder and of love."

"A good deal of talk about the Royal visit in Ireland; the good sense with which the King has acted, and the bad servile style in which poor Paddy has received him; Mr. O'Connell pre-eminent in blarney and inconsistency."

"[H]e had a natural propensity to exaggeration, and, like all popular orators, a great passion for producing those effects which the statement of a startling fact in an unqualified form so often causes."

"In truth, it is impossible to conceive a more powerful advocate than Mr O'Connell was before a judge and jury. They who have heard him in Parliament only, can form no notion of the man such as he was whilst wielding men’s minds in his natural sphere of action. Impassioned and vigorous as Brougham, discreet, argumentative, and zealous for his client, and forgetful of himself as Lyndhurst, he had a playfulness of humor, a readiness of wit to affix an irresistably ludicrous epithet, or apply some story fraught with ridicule in an appalling degree, where he pleased,—a power, moreover, of deepest pathos, to which the former two were strangers. No man that ever spoke, did probably possess the power of moving the feelings and passions of a jury in the same degree as Mr O'Connell... The deep melody of O'Connell's voice added force and dignity to what he uttered. The minor tones struck upon the heart with the solemn music of a distant bell at night-fall."

"Utterly lost to all sense of shame and decency, trampling truth and honour under his feet, cast off by all respectable men, he makes his faults and his vices subservient to the extension of his influence, for he says and does whatever suits his purpose for the moment, secure that no detection or subsequent exposure will have the slightest effect with those over whose minds and passions he rules, with such despotic sway. He cares not whom he insults, because, having covered his cowardice with the cloak of religious scruples, he is invulnerable, and will resent no retaliation that can be offered him."

"Huskisson made a shabby speech enough, O'Connell his début, and a successful one, heard with profound attention; his manner good and his arguments attended and replied to."

"He was an Irishman, but he was also a cosmopolite. I remember personally how, in the first session of my parliamentary life [1833], he poured out his wit, his pathos, and his earnestness, in the cause of negro emancipation. Having adopted the political creed of Liberalism he was as thorough an English liberal, as if he had had no Ireland to think of. He had energies to spare for Law Reform, Postal Reform (a question of which he probably was one of few to discern at the time the greatness), for secret voting, for Corn Law Repeal, in short for whatever tended, within the political sphere, to advance human happiness and freedom."

"It is, however, a misnomer to call him a demagogue. If I may coin a word for the occasion, he was an ethnagogue. He was not the leader either of plebs or populus against optimates: he was the leader of a nation; and this nation, weak, outnumbered, and despised, he led, not always unsuccessfully, in its controversy with another nation, the strongest perhaps and the proudest in Europe."

"If O'Connell appear regardless of truth and justice in his persecutions of the Protestants, let them recollect what must have been the feelings naturally excited in his soul by the laws to which he was subjected in the earlier part of his life. With talents which he must have felt sufficient to raise him to eminence in his profession, or to enable him to act an important part in the grand theatre of politics, he found himself precluded by our Protestant institutions from all hope of attaining the rank and honours which are the legitimate rewards of success in his profession, and condemned to pass his life in the drudgery of a stuff-gown lawyer. In politics his religion opposed an equal obstacle to his advancement. He could not even have become a member of the House of Commons, although thousands of his countrymen were anxious to elect him. Even those who may be disposed to defend those restrictions as necessary for the protection of our Protestant institutions, will at least admit that they were not calculated to excite any kind feeling towards those institutions in the breasts of those who suffered by them. Those restrictions have, it is true, been removed; but Mr. O'Connell was fifty-six years of age when that removal took place, and at such an the character of any man is not easily altered; and we should not be surprised that his hatred towards Protestants still remains in undiminished force."

"Daniel O'Connell appears to me to have been the greatest mob orator that we have ever had in this country, and he also excelled in Parliament."

"Now we have a precise idea of the political character of O'Connell. And I have often marvelled when I have listened to those who have denounced his hypocrisy or admired his skill, when they have read of the triumphant demagogue humbling himself in the mud before a simple priest. There was no hypocrisy in this, no craft. The agent recognised his principal, the slave bowed before his lord; and when he pressed to his lips those sacred robes, reeking with whisky and redolent of incense, I doubt not that his soul was filled at the same time with unaffected awe and devout gratitude."

"This man, O'Connell, is the hired instrument of the Papacy; as such, his mission is to destroy your Protestant Society, and, as such, he is a more terrible enemy to England than Napoleon, with all his inspiration. Your empire and your liberties are in more danger at this moment than when the army of invasion was encamped at Boulogne."

"And now I make this declaration—that if the Repeal of the Union depended upon my change of opinion, or the suppression of my sentiments with respect to the slavery of the negro, I would neither change the one nor suppress the other. I am not bound to look to consequences in a matter of principle like this, and this, therefore, I do say, that, come what may, I shall never cease to pour out my entire heart and soul in reprobating and in calling down the curses of mankind upon that vile system."

"One day I was walking through London with Tom Campbell the poet, when we met a negro, who took off his hat and begged to thank me for my efforts against slavery. Campbell's poetic fancy was smitten, and he exclaimed with great fervour: "I'd rather receive such a tribute as that than have all the crowned heads of Europe making bows to me.""

"What care I for the vagabonds if they were twice as powerful? I would rather have one Irish landed proprietor of weight than all their slave-breeders. It is ourselves alone must work out Repeal."

"I was maddened when I heard the bells of St. Patrick's ringing out a joyful peal for Ireland's degradation, as if it was a glorious national festival. My blood boiled, and I vowed, on that morning, that the foul dishonour should not last, if I could ever put an end to it."