monarchists

"A man of talent and of clean good sense, Who speaks with polished air — On silver floods of his own eloquence He floats to God knows where."

"His colonial career though brilliant in parts was, on the whole, unsatisfactory, largely owing to British prejudice against an avowed 'Irish rebel' and partly owing to un attractive characteristics of temperament. My acquaintance with him was slight and short. He was Speaker of the Legislative Assembly when I entered it for a day in 1879 but not when I returned in 1880. His intellectual forehead, dignified demeanour and carefully polished utterances well fitted him for the post, though his voice at once weak and harsh, thin and squeaky, and his cold, calculating eye indicated the physical and emotional defects which helped to cripple his efforts and to defeat his soaring ambition. The literary graces and practised craftsmanship manifest in all his writings indicate the natural bent of his abilities and enable him to present in his autobiography a flattering full-length portrait of himself as he believed himself or desired others to believe him to be."

"A splendidly built man of towering height but never unwieldy, with a high forehead, keen eyes glittering through his spectacles, strongly marked features, and manly address, his many charms of character and some powers of mind were ill conjoined. He was not only prejudiced even among the New South Welshmen of his day, but obstinate, eccentric and changeable. Converted from an ardent Free Trader into a strong Protectionist almost without an interval long enough to permit of baptism, he compared it, himself. to the miraculous conversion of St Paul."

"Sir Thomas was a man of business, stout, florid, choleric, curt and Cromwellian."

"He was petulent as a child, irritable to a degree at the least criticism, oscillating between apparently unaffected indifference to public opinion and the keenest appetite for its applause. The genuine indifference was that of a jaded man who has lost self-confidence and is thoroughly weak of will. His affected indifference was part of a theatrical pose he played with foolish ostentation. He was such a mass of weaknesses and wilfulnesses and insincerities that he leaned for support upon any who could win his confidence, which could always be accomplished by flatterers or intriguers."

"His nervous instability was painful, his poses perpetual and his vanity colossal."

"He had apparently no illusions, no passions and no pre dominantly great ideals. He had the official manner, imperturbable and impenetrable, which would have made the fortune of an ambassador in Bismarck's eves."

"In public life ... he had but one aim — his own aggrandisement."

"He was timorous, changeable, inconsistent, erratic, gloomy and absorbed, then sparkling and excitable by turns, his fine face pale and puffy — his fine head rapidly turning grey — his figure growing too portly — his hand trembling, his eye restless, his demeanour that of one who drifted in and out of dreams and some of them bad dreams."

"He sought rest only in perpetual physical motion."

"Though a Tasmanian born he appealed at all times to the narrowest Sydney and New South Wales provincialism by the pettiest and meanest acts and proposals. He was an anti- Federalist from the first, except upon terms which should ensure the absolute supremacy of his own colony as a stepping- stone to his own elevation."

"Que d'eau! Que d'eau!"

"C'est vous le negre? Très bien. Continuez, mon ami, continuez!"

"Fièvre typhoide? Mauvaise affaire, très mauvaise affaire! Un homme en meurt, ou il reste idiot pour le reste de sa vie. J'en sais quelque chose. J'ai eu la fièvre typhoide en Algérie."

"J'y suis, et j'y reste."

"Ukraine is recognized as the most threatened part of Russia in terms of secession and conquest. Ukrainian separatism is an artificial phenomenon, devoid of real grounds. It arose from the ambition of the leaders and the international intrigue of conquest. Little Russians are a branch of a single, Slavic-Russian people. This branch has no reason to be at enmity with other branches of the same people and to separate into a separate state. Having seceded, this state betrays itself to be conquered and plundered by foreigners. Little Russia and Great Russia are bound together by faith, tribe, historical fate, geographical location, economy, culture and politics. The foreigners who are preparing the dismemberment must remember that they are declaring by this to the whole of Russia a centuries-old struggle. There will be no peace and no economic prosperity under such a dismemberment. Russia will turn into a source of civil and international wars for centuries. The dismembering power will become the most hated of the enemies of national Russia. In the struggle against it, all alliances and all means will be used. Russia will shift its center to the Urals, gather all its huge forces, develop its technology, find powerful allies for itself and fight until it completely and forever undermines the power of the dismembering power. National Russia is not looking for anyone's death, but it will be able to respond in time to any attempt at dismemberment and will fight to the end. It is more profitable for any power to have Russia as a friend, not an enemy. History hasn't said its last word yet..."

"Western European humanity moves by will and reason. A Russian person lives first of all with his heart and imagination, and only then with his will and mind. Therefore, the average European is ashamed of sincerity, conscience and kindness [regarding it] as "stupidity"; A Russian person, on the contrary, expects from a person, first of all, kindness, conscience and sincerity. Original: Западноевропейское человечество движется волею и рассудком. Русский человек живет прежде всего сердцем и воображением и лишь потом волею и умом. Поэтому средний европеец стыдится искренности, совести и доброты как «глупости»; русский человек, наоборот, ждет от человека прежде всего доброты, совести и искренности."

"They make excellent life-partners. No doubt some old bigots will claim that marriage is a uniquely human institution, but it won't take long to find enlightened vicars who believe that human and canine dignity is in a very real sense enhanced by recognising inter-species unions."

"It is possible, though hard, to forge a United Kingdom made up of many ethnicities. Leaders like Mr Cameron are right to try to insist on common standards and better rules, rather than to despair. But whatever it is, and however well it turns out, it cannot be England. Perhaps when I am very old, my grandchildren will ask me what England was. It will be a hard question to answer, but I think I shall tell them that it seemed like a good idea while it lasted, and that it lasted for about 1,000 years."

"Mr Charles Moore announced he will be stepping down in April after six years as editor [of The Spectator], during which time the magazine's circulation doubled to 37,000 and advertising revenue increased tenfold."

"People are often silly in their attacks on these things. Elites are inevitable and have some good qualities. Any old society will and should have an establishment. Yet a mark of greatness in politics is a capacity to transcend these elites – witness Churchill, who was born into one, and Thatcher, who was not. Jenkins did not do this. Unlike his wife, says Campbell, he was "handicapped by the wish to please'". He most wished to please the grandees who fitted his rather definition of the word "civilised"."

"Looking forward, as one always must, I wonder if the law will eventually be changed to allow one to marry one's dog. Until now, this would have been considered disgusting, since marriage has been a law revolving around sexual behaviour, and sexual acts with animals are still, I believe, illegal."

"When Sir Keir rightly attacked anti-Semitism in his party, he did not analyse its nature clearly enough. It is not like the old Right-wing anti-Semitism which regarded Jews as creepy foreigners. Rather it a lethally political cocktail of two things – whites on the hard Left who hate anything white, Western or British, and Islamists who, for pseudo-religious reasons, see Jews as the eternal enemy and imagine Allah is telling them to take Palestine by slaughter."

"How much survives of the other peacetime prime ministers since the war? What were John Major and Harold Wilson and Anthony Eden for? Won't Tony Blair's manic grin end up as ruined as Ozymandias's "wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command"? Among the great might-have-been-prime ministers, most fall into one of two traps. On the one hand are the too greedily ambitious, the Denis Healeys who don't stand up to the enemy at the moment they should, and the Michael Heseltines, who are too impatient of the system that they seek to dominate. On the other are the prophets – the Bevans, Benns and Powells – who may be more original than their more conventional rivals, but cannot be called successful."

"Labour insiders are more aware than most voters of the danger of the weird alliance between punitive Muslim extremists who believe women are inferior, homosexuals should be killed etc and the usually white hard-left Corbynites whose social agenda is completely different but share Islamist hatred of Israel and the West."

"There should also be a presumption that the authorities should stop taking more power over people and should start handing power back. Why should trial by jury be curtailed, or the assets of people suspected of profiting from crime be seized, or the Customs and Excise have the power to enter your house? Why should the police be able to subject drivers to random breath tests, or to spy on the public through CCTV, or the Government keep information on you that it shares across departments, or tell you whom to employ, or intercept your electronic communications?"

"The burden should not be on people to prove why they should be allowed to do something, but on the authorities to prove why they shouldn't. Thus, why shouldn't people be free to hunt, or smoke cannabis, or build an extension to their house, or travel without an identity card, or read pornography on the internet, or adopt children? There may be reasons to prevent any or all of these things, but the restrictors should be the ones who have to make their case."

"C'est un terrible luxe que l'incredulité."

"L'imagination est amie de l'avenir."

"Dieu est la plus haute mesure de notre incapacité; l'universe, l'espace lui-même, ne sont pas si inaccessibles."

"Tout le monde a besoin de la France, quand l'Angleterre a besoin de tout le monde."

"Ce qui n'est pas clair n'est pas français."

"C'est la prose qui donne l'empire à une Langue, parce qu'elle est tout usuelle; la poésie n'est qu'un objet de luxe."

"L'homme qui parle est … l'homme qui pense tout haut."

"Le langage est la peinture de nos idées."

"L'être qui ne fait de sentir, ne pense pas encore; et l'être qui pense, sent toujours."

"La certitude et le mystère sont pour le sentiment; la clarté et l'incertitude pour le raisonnement."

"La raison est historienne, mais les passions sont actrices."

"Le prince absolu peut être un Néron, mais il est quelquefois Titus ou Marc-Aurèle; le peuple est souvent Néron, et jamais Marc-Aurèl."

"La politique est comme le sphinx de la fable, elle dévore tous ceux qui n'expliquent pas ses énigmes."

"Le chat ne nous caresse pas, il se caresse à nous."

"Les idées sont des fonds qui ne portent intérèt qu'entre les mains du talent."

"La religion unit les hommes dans les mêmes dogmes, la politique les unit dans les mêmes principes, et la philosophie les renvoie dans les bois; c'est le dissolvant de la société."

"Marriage is therefore not an ordinary contract, since in terminating it, the two parties cannot return themselves to the same state they were in before entering into it. And if the contract is voluntary at the time it is entered into, it can no longer be voluntary, and almost never is, at the time of its termination, since the party which manifests the desire to dissolve it takes all liberty from the other party to refuse, and has only too many means to force its consent."

"In the social body as in every organized body — that is, one in which the parts are arranged in certain relationships to each other relative to a given end — the cessation of vital functions does not come from the annihilation of their parts, but from their displacement and the disturbances of their relationships."

"A nobleman is not only a subject, he is the most subordinate of all."

"Father, mother, child, which express both the union of the sexes and de production of the being, can only be considered dependently on one another, and relatively to one another. A woman could exist without the existence of a man; but there is no mother if there is no father, nor a child without both of them. Each one of these ways of being presumes and recalls the other two; that is to say, they are relative. Considered thus, they are called relationships, in Latin, ratio; father, mother, child are persons, and their union forms the family. The union of the sexes, which is the foundation of all these relationships, is called marriage."

"I don't hold a hose, mate."

"We must respect and harness the passion and aspiration of our younger generations, we must guard against others who would seek to compound or, worse, facelessly exploit their anxiety for their own agendas. We must similarly not allow their concerns to be dismissed or diminished as this can also increase their anxiety. What parent could do otherwise? Our children have a right not just to their future but to their optimism."

"That's not my job."