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John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn
83 quotes
“The extreme advanced party is likely for the future to have on its side a great portion of the most highly cultivated intellect in the nation, and the contest will lie between brains and numbers on the one side, and wealth, rank, vested interest, possession in short, on the other.”
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) first seen 1867 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: ‘Young England and the Political Future’, The Fortnightly Review, No. XXXVIII (1 January 1867), pp. 491–492
“The new problem for statesmen will be not how the Queen's Government may be carried on, but how the National Will may be most promptly executed.”
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) first seen 1867 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: ‘The Liberal Programme’, The Fortnightly Review, No. IX (1 September 1867), pp. 363
“If we survey the entire field of political action, we shall find that progress, wherever it is stayed, is stayed by the untimely relics of territorialism, and that in removing them we at once find ourselves led on to the true conditions by taking the policy of industry for our foundation. The industrial policy is emphatically the national policy... At nearly every point it is the superstition or sinister interest of the territorial power which thwarts, restrains, and depresses the harmonious adjustment of laws and administration to the needs of the public well-being.”
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) first seen 1867 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: ‘The Liberal Programme’, The Fortnightly Review, No. IX (1 September 1867), pp. 367–368
“It is not for the candidates, but for the temper shown by the constituencies, that one may grieve, if there be matter for grief in the unmistakable proof which the elections are furnishing, that people do not recognise the necessity of giving supreme political power to supreme political intelligence.”
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) first seen 1868 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 'Old Parties and New Policy', The Fortnightly Review, No. XXI (1 September 1868), p. 330
“In the American civil war partisanship with the sides there was the veil of a kind of civil war here. An unspoken instinct revealed to mutually hostile classes in England that their battle also was being fought in the contest between the free North and the slave-holding South. The triumph of the North, as has been often remarked, was the force that made English liberalism powerful enough to enfranchise the workmen, depose official Christianity in Ireland, and deal a first blow at the landlords.”
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) first seen 1870 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: ‘England and the War’, The Fortnightly Review, No. XLVI (1 October 1870), p. 479
“I shall not flinch if they decapitate or flagellate all the bishops and curés in Paris.”
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) first seen 1871 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Frederic Harrison on the Paris Commune (14 April 1871), quoted in D. A. Hamer, Lord Morley: Liberal Intellectual in Politics (1968), p. 97
“Where it is a duty to worship the sun it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat.”
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) first seen 1871 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Voltaire (1871)
“Nature, in her most dazzling aspects or stupendous parts, is but the background and theatre of the tragedy of man.”
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) first seen 1871 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Critical Miscellanies, Volume I, Essay 3: Byron (1871)
“Household suffrage as yet is only a thing on paper. We have still to feel its reality. The new possessors of power are still hardly aware that it is theirs. And who are the new possessors of power? The skilled artisans, the leaders of trade societies, and the like? Alas, no; it is not they but those below them, those between the artisan and the pauper, who, whenever they choose to awake, or whenever they choose in their dreams to let somebody else lead them, hold the destinies of our society in their hands.”
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) first seen 1873 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 'The Struggle for National Education. III', The Fortnightly Review, No. LXXXII (1 October 1873), p. 420
“In plain English, a majority of those who come out of the schools cannot read a newspaper. This unfortunate class is our ruling class. Their votes can carry elections, change administrations, decide policies. As yet they have no initiative, and it may be some time before they cease to follow the initiative of others. When their time comes, and a leader, they will make terrible short work with a good deal that you hold precious now.”
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) first seen 1873 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 'The Struggle for National Education. III', The Fortnightly Review, No. LXXXII (1 October 1873), p. 420
“Evolution is not a force but a process; not a cause but a law.”
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) first seen 1874 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On Compromise (1874)
“You have not converted a man, because you have silenced him.”
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) first seen 1874 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On Compromise (1874), ch. 5
“Do let us try to give a national, not a class tone to English politics .”
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) first seen 1874 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter (May 1874), quoted in F. W. Hirst, Early Life & Letters of John Morley, Volume I (1927), p. 300
“If the country does best, where State action is least, you at least require political effort enough to reduce those noxious forms of State action which have come down to us from the imprudence of pre-scientific days. The philosopher, for example, who is most in earnest for the free play of social forces, is bound before all other men to press on for the disestablishment of the State Church.”
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) first seen 1875 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 'The Liberal Eclipse', The Fortnightly Review, No. XCVIII (1 February 1875), pp. 298-299
“Germany is the power in whose strength, prosperity, and vigorous government, Europe has the most vital interest, because she is the Power best able from her position to deal with Russia.”
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) first seen 1877 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: ‘Home and Foreign Affairs’, The Fortnightly Review, No. CXXI. New Series (1 January 1877), p. 139
“Those who would treat politics and morality apart will never understand the one or the other.”
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) said by 1923 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You cannot demonstrate an emotion or prove an aspiration.”
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) said by 1923 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is not enough to do good; one must do it the right way.”
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) said by 1923 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I'm all against your “autoritaire”. I don't believe in it, and I never did. Your Cromwells and Fredericks don't do their work half as well as slow sober free American citizens.”
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) first seen 1883 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Joseph Chamberlain (17 June 1883), quoted in D. A. Hamer, Lord Morley: Liberal Intellectual in Politics (1968), p. 56
“Yet the Opposition refused to extend the franchise unless they were assured that there would be some manipulation or re-arrangement of seats, which, would, in fact, be taking away with one hand what was given with the other. He regretted that proportional representation should have been introduced into the debate from that side of the House, for all these schemes were but new disguises for the old Tory distrust of the people.”
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) first seen 1884 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech in the House of Commons (3 April 1884)
“Yes, gentlemen, be sure that no power on earth can separate henceforth the question of mending the House of Commons from the other question of mending or ending the House of Lords. (Loud cheers, the whole assembly rising and waving their hats.)”
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) first seen 1884 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech to a conference of Liberal delegates in St. James's Hall (30 July 1884), quoted in The Times (31 July 1884), p. 7
“I hope...Her Majesty's Ministers...will...say that the Soudan must be left to its own people to work out their own deliverance in their own fashion.”
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) first seen 1885 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech in the House of Commons against the Mahdist War (23 February 1885)
“But are you so sure...that when Ulster, or the corner of Ulster knows that Great Britain has made up its mind that there is to be an effective, a real self-government in Ireland—are you so sure Ulster will turn its back upon Ireland and claim to be excluded from such Government? (“No.”) I do not believe it... I say that a good deal of this zeal for Ulster is artificial.”
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) first seen 1887 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech to the National Reform Union in Manchester (6 July 1887), quoted in The Times (7 July 1887), p. 7
“I half wrote a discourse on modern democracy, how the rule of numbers is to be reconciled with the rule of sage judgment, and the passion for liberty and equality is to be reconciled with sovereign regard for law, authority, and order; and how our hopes for the future are to be linked to wise reverence for tradition and the past.”
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) first seen 1887 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 'Aphorisms', an address delivered before the Edinburgh Philosophical Institutions (11 November 1887), quoted in John Morley, Studies in Literature (1901), p. 54
“There is a loud cry in these days for clues that shall guide the plain man through the vast bewildering labyrinth of printed volumes.”
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) first seen 1887 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Mr. Morley at Edinburgh: Aphorisms: an address delivered before the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution, November 11 1887, p. 3 (Macmillan, 1887)
“[S]o far as sick pay is concerned, I do not see how the State is to be responsible for the payment of...sick pay, how the State is to be able to exercise that efficient control over what is known as malingering, feigning sickness, though the friendly societies are able to do so.”
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) first seen 1889 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech in Newcastle (22 April 1889), quoted in The Times (23 April 1889), p. 8
“I confess that I am in favour, if we can, of sticking to the old system by which you yourselves shall use your own judgment and your own energy in order to cultivate the virtue of thrift, and in order to see that thrift is rewarded... I cannot conceive a more important virtue to cultivate than this of thrift.”
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) first seen 1889 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech in Newcastle (22 April 1889), quoted in The Times (23 April 1889), p. 8
“According to my observation, the change in my own generation is different. They have ceased either to trust or to distrust liberty, and have come to the mind that it matters little either way. Men are disenchanted. They have got what they wanted in the days of their youth, yet what of it, they ask?”
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) first seen 1891 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Remarks to William Ewart Gladstone (27 December 1891), quoted in John Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Volume III (1903), p. 475
“I want to take in all these labour questions from the largest possible nationalist point of view, and it is this—that while the State should do all that it prudently can to protect the health and life, not only of women and children, but of the whole assembly of workers, it is absurd, it is perilous to thrust Acts of Parliament, as I have said before, like the steam ram-rod into the delicate machinery of commercial undertakings.”
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) first seen 1895 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech at Newcastle (2 December 1895), quoted in The Times (3 December 1895), p. 6
“We all know that the besetting danger of Churches is formalism; the besetting danger of State action, of corporate action, is officialism and mechanism; and we all know that it is a drawback to many modern ideals that they rest upon materialism and a soulless secularism.”
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) first seen 1898 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech opening the Passmore Edwards Settlement (12 February 1898), quoted in The Times (14 February 1898), p. 12
“Simplicity of character is no hindrance to subtlety of intellect.”
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) first seen 1903 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Life of Gladstone (1903), vol. 1, p. 194
“The conference of railway men will damage us gravely with the middle class, for railways are the middle class investment, and to pull profits down...as they admit to be the effect of their demand—will frighten people. And if anybody thinks we can govern this country against the middle class, he is wrong.”
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) first seen 1906 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Henry Fowler (30 September 1906), quoted in Edith Henrietta Fowler, The Life of Henry Hartley Fowler: First Viscount Wolverhampton, G.C.S.I. (1912), p. 505
“I am as cautious a Whig as any Elliot, Russell, or Grey, that was ever born.”
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) first seen 1906 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Lord Minto (30 November 1906), quoted in D. A. Hamer, Lord Morley: Liberal Intellectual in Politics (1968), p. 293
“I have often thought that Strafford was an ideal type, both for governor of Ireland in the 17th century, and governor of India in the 20th century.”
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) first seen 1907 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Lord Minto (19 September 1907), quoted in D. A. Hamer, Lord Morley: Liberal Intellectual in Politics (1968), p. 56
“I submit that it is an Agreement that this country may not only be contented with, but proud of.”
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) first seen 1908 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech in the House of Commons on the Anglo-Russian Convention (17 February 1908)
“Define it as we may, faith in Progress has been the mainspring of Liberalism in all its schools and branches.”
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) first seen 1908 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: ‘Democracy and Reaction’, Miscellanies: Fourth Series (1908), p. 293
“[I] always had a soft place in my heart for the patrician Whigs.”
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) first seen 1908 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Lord Minto (1 October 1908), quoted in D. A. Hamer, Lord Morley: Liberal Intellectual in Politics (1968), p. 293
“I am, and always have been, a pretty strong individualist.”
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) first seen 1909 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech in the House of Lords (29 November 1909), quoted in The Times (30 November 1909), p. 6
“I am a theorist, but I detest the introduction of abstract principles into the great practical difficulties of this nation.”
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) first seen 1910 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech in the House of Lords (24 November 1910)
“History, as Treitschke contends, is first of all the presentation of res gestae, and of active statesmen. The essential things in the statesman are strength of will, courage, massive ambition, passionate joy in the result. It needs no wizard to see how such doctrine as this lends a hand to the sinister school of political historians, who insist that the event is its own justification; that Force and Right are one.”
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) first seen 1912 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: ‘Politics and History’, Address as Chancellor of the University of Manchester (summer 1912), quoted in The Works of Lord Morley: Volume IV (1921), p. 33
“The noble Earl, Lord Curzon, stated that he could not understand how it is that we, the Party who have always taken the side of people rightly struggling to be free, do not sympathise with Ulster. In all the cases that he named—Italy, Greece, and so forth—there was actual oppression and hateful misgovernment. No one says there is actual oppression or hateful misgovernment in Ulster. It is all hypothesis.”
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) first seen 1913 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech in the House of Lords on the Home Rule Bill (30 January 1913)
“The decrepitude that ended in the Latin conquest of Constantinople at the beginning of the thirteenth century, and the Mahometan conquest in the middle of the fifteenth, is an awkward reproof to the optimist superstition that civilized communities are universally bound somehow or another to be progressive.”
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) first seen 1914 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Notes on Politics and History: A University Address (1914), p. 90
“I was always opposed to the Anglo-Russian agreement—so was Kitchener. Who stands most to gain out of this war? Russia. Who is the real aggressor? Russia. At the end of it we shall have her on our backs. What do you imagine will be the effect on the Indian mind of the employment of Indian troops against Europeans?”
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) first seen 1914 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Remarks to John Hartman Morgan (13 September 1914), quoted in J. H. Morgan, John, Viscount Morley: An Appreciation and Some Reminiscences (1924), p. 42
“Censorship...ought to be confined to the temporary suppression of military and naval news which might assist the enemy... Public opinion might be fallible, but it was not half as fallible as individual opinion, and, good or bad, the Government had to lean upon it; how could they do that unless public opinion had full, free, and correct information as to facts?”
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) first seen 1915 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech in the House of Lords (3 November 1915), quoted in The Times (4 November 1915), p. 9
“I'm sick of Wilson ... He hailed the Russian Revolution six months ago as the new Golden Age, and I said to Page, “What does he know of Russia?” to which Page replied, “Nothing.” As for his talk about a union of hearts after the war, the world is not made like that.”
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) first seen 1918 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Remarks to John Hartman Morgan (15 February 1918), quoted in J. H. Morgan, John, Viscount Morley: An Appreciation and Some Reminiscences (1924), p. 92
“A mirage, and an old one... One may as well talk of London morality being due to the Archbishop of Canterbury. But take away Scotland Yard!”
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) first seen 1918 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Answer to John Hartman Morgan, who asked him what he thought of the League of Nations (15 February 1918), quoted in J. H. Morgan, John, Viscount Morley: An Appreciation and Some Reminiscences (1924), p. 92
“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 always be a case of “Thy head or my head.” I've no faith in these schemes.”
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) first seen 1919 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Answer to John Hartman Morgan, who asked him what he thought of the Covenant of the League of Nations (1919), quoted in J. H. Morgan, John, Viscount Morley: An Appreciation and Some Reminiscences (1924), p. 91
“Liberalism, as we have known it, is dead beyond resurrection.”
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) first seen 1919 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Remarks to John Hartman Morgan (6 May 1919), quoted in J. H. Morgan, John, Viscount Morley: An Appreciation and Some Reminiscences (1924), p. 99
“As for progress, what signs of it are there now? And all we Victorians believed in it from the Utilitarians onwards.”
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) first seen 1919 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Remarks to John Hartman Morgan (end of 1919), quoted in J. H. Morgan, John, Viscount Morley: An Appreciation and Some Reminiscences (1924), p. 37
“There are some books which cannot be adequately reviewed for twenty or thirty years after they come out.”
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) said by 1923 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source