Famous quotes

Quotes by famous people, credited to who said them. Your own quotes must not match any of these. More are added all the time. 1,158,269 quotes Who coined it · How we decide

English Italiano Polski עברית Français Português فارسی Español 中文 Русский Deutsch العربية हिन्दी 日本語 Ελληνικά Latina

William Ewart Gladstone

177 quotes

“I have clung to the notion of a conscience, and a Catholic conscience, in the State, until that idea has become in the general mind so feeble, as to be absolutely inappreciable in the movement of public affairs. I do not know whether there is one man opposing the Maynooth Bill upon that principle. When I have found myself the last man in the ship, I think that I am free to leave it.”
William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) first seen 1844 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to John Henry Newman (19 April 1845), quoted in The Correspondence of Henry Edward Manning and William Ewart Gladstone: Volume Two, 1844–1853, ed. Peter C. Erb (2013), p. 141
“Ireland, Ireland! That cloud in the west! That coming storm! That minister of God's retribution upon cruel, inveterate, and but half-atoned injustice! Ireland forces upon us those great social and great religious questions—God grant that we may have courage to look them in the face, and to work through them.”
William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) first seen 1845 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to his wife, Catherine Gladstone (12 October 1845), quoted in John Morley, The Life of Wiliam Ewart Gladstone, Volume I (1903), p. 383
“I believe the slave trade to be by far the foulest crime that taints the history of mankind in any Christian or pagan country.”
William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) first seen 1850 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech in the House of Commons (19 March 1850)
“This is the negation of God erected into a system of Government.”
William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) first seen 1851 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A letter to the Earl of Aberdeen, on the state prosecutions of the Neapolitan government (7 April 1851), p. 9
“From the ancient strife of territorial acquisition we are labouring, I trust and believe, to substitute another, a peaceful and a fraternal strife among nations, the honest and the noble race of industry and art.”
William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) first seen 1852 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: An Examination of the official reply of the Neapolitan Government (1852), p. 50
“[I]f it be true that, at periods now long past, England has had her full share of influence in stimulating by her example the martial struggles of the world, may she likewise be forward, now and hereafter, to show that she has profited by the heavy lessons of experience, and to be—if, indeed, in the designs of Providence, she is elected to that office—the standard-bearer of the nations upon the fruitful paths of peace, industry, and commerce.”
William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) first seen 1852 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: An Examination of the official reply of the Neapolitan Government (1852), p. 50
“When we speak of general war, we don't mean real progress on the road of freedom, the real, moral, and social advancement of man, achieved by force. This may be the intention, but how rarely is it the result of general war! We mean this:—That the face of nature is stained with human gore—we mean that taxation is increased and industry diminished—we know that it means that burdens unreasonable and untold are entailed on late posterity—we know that it means that demoralization is let loose, that families are broken up, that lusts become unbridled in every country to which that war is extended.”
William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) first seen 1853 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech at Manchester (12 October 1853), quoted in The Times (13 October 1853), p. 7
“There is but one way of maintaining permanently what I may presume to call the great international policy and law of Europe—but one way of keeping within bounds any one of the Powers possessed of such strength as France, England, or Russia, if it be bent on an aggressive policy, and that is, by maintaining not so much great fleets, or other demonstrations of physical force, which I believe to be really an insignificant part of the case, but the moral union—the effective concord of Europe.”
William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) first seen 1855 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech in the House of Commons (3 August 1855)
“There is a policy going a begging; the general policy that Sir Robert Peel in 1841 took office to support—the policy of peace abroad, of economy, of financial equilibrium, of steady resistance to abuses, and promotion of practical improvements at home, with a disinclination to questions of reform, gratuitously raised.”
William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) first seen 1856 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Whitwell Elwin (2 December 1856), quoted in John Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Volume I (1903), p. 553
“To maintain a steady surplus of income over expenditure—to lower indirect taxes when excessive in amount for the relief of the people and bearing in mind the reproductive power inherent in such operations—to simplify our fiscal system by concentrating its pressure on a few well chosen articles of extended consumption—and to conciliate support to the income tax by marking its temporary character and by associating it with beneficial changes in the laws: these aims have been for fifteen years the labour of our life.”
William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) first seen 1845 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Memorandum (14 February 1857), quoted in John Brooke and Mary Sorensen (eds.), The Prime Minister's Papers: W. E. Gladstone. III: Autobiographical Memoranda 1845–1866 (1978), p. 215
“Decision by majorities is as much an expedient, as lighting by gas.”
William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) first seen 1858 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age (Oxford University Press, 1858), p. 116.
“Economy is the first and great article (economy such as I understand it) in my financial creed. The controversy between direct and indirect taxation holds a minor, though important place.”
William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) first seen 1859 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to his brother Robertson of the Financial Reform Association at Liverpool (1859), as quoted in Gladstone as Financier and Economist (1931) by F. W. Hirst, p. 241
“I am certain, from experience, of the immense advantage of strict account-keeping in early life. It is just like learning the grammar then, which when once learned need not be referred to afterwards.”
William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) first seen 1860 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Mrs. Gladstone (14 January 1860), as quoted in Gladstone as Financier and Economist (1931) by F. W. Hirst, p. 242
“[T]he great aim—the moral and political significance of the act, and its probable and desired fruit in binding the two countries together by interest and affection. Neither you nor I attach for the moment any superlative value to this Treaty for the sake of the extension of British trade. ... What I look to is the social good, the benefit to the relations of the two countries, and the effect on the peace of Europe.”
William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) first seen 1809 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Richard Cobden (c. 1860), quoted in H. C. G. Matthew, Gladstone, 1809–1874 (1986), p. 113
“Sir, there was once a time when close relations of amity were established between the Governments of England and France. It was in the reign of the later Stuarts; and it marks a dark spot in our annals, because it was an union formed in a spirit of domineering ambition on the one side, and of base and vile subserviency on the other. But that, Sir, was not an union of the nations; it was an union of the Governments. This is not be an union of the Governments; it is to be an union of the nations.”
William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) first seen 1860 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech in the House of Commons on the Anglo-French Commercial Treaty (10 February 1860)
“We may have our own opinions about slavery; we may be for or against the South; but there is no doubt that Jefferson Davis and other leaders of the South have made an army; they are making, it appears, a navy; and they have made what is more than either—they have made a Nation... We may anticipate with certainty the success of the Southern States so far as regards their separation from the North. I cannot but believe that that event is as certain as any event yet future and countingent can be.”
William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) first seen 1862 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech on the American Civil War, Town Hall, Newcastle upon Tyne (7 October 1862), quoted in The Times (9 October 1862), pp. 7-8
“I mean this, that together with the so-called increase of expenditure there grows up what may be termed a spirit which, insensibly and unconsciously perhaps, but really, affects the spirit of the people, the spirit of parliament, the spirit of the public departments, and perhaps even the spirit of those whose duty it is to submit the estimates to parliament.”
William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) first seen 1863 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech in the House of Commons (16 April 1863), quoted in The Life of William Ewart Gladstone. Volume II (1903) by John Morley, p. 62
“But how is the spirit of expenditure to be exorcised? Not by preaching; I doubt if even by yours. I seriously doubt whether it will ever give place to the old spirit of economy, as long as we have the income-tax. There, or hard by, lie questions of deep practical moment.”
William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) first seen 1864 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Richard Cobden (5 January 1864), quoted in The Life of William Ewart Gladstone Volume II (1903) by John Morley, p. 62
“What are the qualities which fit a man for the exercise of a privilege such as the franchise? Self-command, self-control, respect for order, patience under suffering, confidence in the law, regard for superiors.”
William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) first seen 1864 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech in the House of Commons (11 May 1864)
“As to his Goddess Reason, I understand by it simply an adoption of what are called on the continent the principles of the French Revolution. These we neither want nor warmly relish in England.”
William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) first seen 1861 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Henry Edward Manning after Giuseppe Garibaldi's visit to Britain (c. July 1864), quoted in The Correspondence of Henry Edward Manning and William Ewart Gladstone: Volume Three, 1861–1875, ed. Peter C. Erb (201…
“At last, my friends, I am come amongst you. And I am come…unmuzzled.”
William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) first seen 1865 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech to the electors of South Lancashire. (18 July 1865)
“[T]here appeared to me to have grown up under the present Government a system of what I called, in regard to the public expenditure, making things pleasant all round. That means going from town to town, granting what this community wants, granting what that community wants, granting what the other community wants, and leaving out of sight that huge public which unfortunately has not got the voices and the advocates ready always to defend it against these local and particular claims, but of which it is our highest boast that we seek to be the advocates and the champions.”
William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) first seen 1868 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech in Leigh, Lancashire (20 October 1868), quoted in The Times (21 October 1868), p. 11
“Hephaistos bears in Homer the double stamp of a Nature-Power, representing the element of fire, and of an anthropomorphic deity who is the god of art at a period when the only fine art known was in works of metal produced by the aid of fire.”
William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) first seen 1870 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Jeventus Mundi: The Gods and Men of the Heroic Age (1870) p. 289.
“The transfer of the allegiance and citizenship, of no small part of the heart and life, of human beings from one sovereignty to another, without any reference to their own consent, has been a great reproach to some former transactions in Europe; has led to many wars and disturbances; is hard to reconcile with considerations of equity; and is repulsive to the sense of modern civilization.”
William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) first seen 1792 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Lord Granville (24 September 1870), quoted in Harold Temperley and Lillian M. Penson, Foundations of British Foreign Policy from Pitt (1792) to Salisbury (1902) or Documents, Old and New (1938), pp. 325–326
“I am much oppressed with the idea that this transfer of human beings like chattels should go forward without any voice from collective Europe if it be disposed to speak.”
William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) first seen 1870 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Lord Granville on Germany's annexation of Alsace-Lorraine (30 September 1870), quoted in Agatha Ramm (ed.), The Gladstone–Granville Correspondence [1952] (1998), p. 135
“In moral forces, and in their growing effect upon European politics, I have a great faith: possibly on that very account, I am free to confess, sometimes a misleading one.”
William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) first seen 1792 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Lord Granville (8 October 1870), quoted in Harold Temperley and Lillian M. Penson, Foundations of British Foreign Policy from Pitt (1792) to Salisbury (1902) or Documents, Old and New (1938), p. 323
“On the whole, it seems reasonable to hope that the practical character of our Teutonic cousins [Germany], together with their huge actual mass of domestic sorrows, will assist them to settle down into a mood of peace and goodwill. But whether they do or not, it is idle to apprehend that they have before them a career of universal conquest or absolute predominance, and that the European family is not strong enough to correct the eccentricities of its pecant and obstreperous members.”
William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) first seen 1843 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: ‘Germany, France, and England’, Edinburgh Review (October 1870), quoted in W. E. Gladstone, Gleanings of Past Years, 1843–78. Vol. IV. Foreign (1879), p. 249
“I am inclined to say that the personal attendance and intervention of women in election proceedings, even apart from any suspicion of the wider objects of many of the promoters of the present movement, would be a practical evil not only of the gravest, but even of an intolerable character.”
William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) first seen 1871 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech in the House of Commons on the Women's Disabilities Bill (3 May 1871)
“In London it was not the interests of class which were specially concentrated. It was there that wealth was all-powerful; and wealth has taken desperate offence at their actions during the present year because the Government recommended to Parliament that power in the English army shall no longer be the prize of wealth, but the reward of merit.”
William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) first seen 1871 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech in Whitby on the Cardwell Reforms (2 September 1871), quoted in The Times (4 September 1871), p. 12
“[T]he establishment of freedom of trade and of a general disposition to remove from trade every possible restriction and every possible burden...has been the main agent in raising the commerce of the United Kingdom to that extraordinary position it has now attained. I apprehend that I am stating the matter very moderately if I put it thus, that in the course of the last 30 years our population has increased somewhere about 25 or 30 per cent., while our trade in the same period has increased in the ratio of certainly something not much under 400 per cent.”
William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) first seen 1871 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech in Wakefield (5 September 1871), quoted in The Times (6 September 1871), p. 3
“Not a drop of blood runs in my veins except Scotch blood, and a large share of my heart ever has belonged, and ever will belong, to Scotland.”
William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) first seen 1871 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech in Aberdeen upon receiving the freedom of the city (26 September 1871), quoted in The Times (27 September 1871), p. 6
“The idea of abolishing Income Tax is to me highly attractive, both on other grounds & because it tends to public economy.”
William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) first seen 1873 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to H. C. E. Childers (3 April 1873)
“For myself, I said, not in education only but in all things, including education, I prefer voluntary to legal machinery, when the thing can be well done either way.”
William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) first seen 1873 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to John Bright (21 August 1873), quoted in John Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Volume II (1903), p. 646
“Individual servitude, however abject, will not satisfy the Latin Church. The State must also be a slave.”
William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) first seen 1874 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Vatican Decrees in their Bearing on Civil Allegiance: A Political Exposition (November 1874), quoted in All Roads lead to Rome? The Ecumenical Movement (2004) by Michael de Semlyen
“The history of nations is a melancholy chapter, that is, the history of their Governments. I am sorrowfully of opinion that, though virtue of splendid quality dwells in high regions with individuals, it is chiefly to be found on a large scale with the masses; and the history of nations is one of the most immoral parts of human history.”
William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) first seen 1876 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Olga Novikoff (1876), quoted in Olga Novikoff, Russian Memories (1916), p. 219
“A rational reaction against the irrational excesses and vagaries of scepticism may, I admit, readily degenerate into the rival folly of credulity. To be engaged in opposing wrong affords, under the conditions of our mental constitution, but a slender guarantee for being right.”
William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) first seen 1876 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Homeric Synchronism : An Enquiry Into the Time and Place of Homer (1876), Introduction
“The operations of commerce are not confined to the material ends; that there is no more powerful agent in consolidating and in knitting together the amity of nations; and that the great moral purpose of the repression of human passions, and those lusts and appetites which are the great cause of war, is in direct relation with the understanding and application of the science which you desire to propagate.”
William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) first seen 1876 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech to the Political Economy Club (31 May 1876) upon the centenary of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations
“[T]he effect of that [Crimean] war was ... to substitute a European conscience, expressed by collective guarantee and the concerted and general action of the European Powers for the sole and individual action of one of them. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of that principle.”
William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) first seen 1876 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech in the House of Commons (31 July 1876)
“There is, in fact, a great deal of resemblance between the system which prevails in Turkey and the old system of negro slavery. In some respects it is less bad than negro slavery, and in other respects a great deal worse. It is worse in this respect, that in the case of negro slavery, at any rate, it was a race of higher capacities ruling over a race of lower capacities; but in the case of this system, it is unfortunately a race of lower capacities which rules over a race of higher capacities.”
William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) first seen 1877 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech in Hawarden (16 January 1877), quoted in W. E. Gladstone, The Sclavonic Provinces of the Ottoman Empire (1877)
“My opinion is and has long been that the vital principle of the Liberal party, like that of Greek art, is action, and that nothing but action will ever make it worthy of the name of a party.”
William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) first seen 1876 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Lord Granville (19 May 1877), quoted in Agatha Ramm (ed.), The Gladstone–Granville Correspondence, 1876–1886 (1962), p. 40
“You will find, I think, that the predominating idea of Conservatism is the Egyptian principle of repose; but in our Liberal Party we have got the Greek idea of life and motion.”
William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) first seen 1877 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech in Birmingham (31 May 1877), quoted in The Times (1 June 1877), p. 10
“Nonconformity...still supplies, to so great an extent, the backbone of British Liberalism.”
William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) first seen 1843 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: ‘The County Franchise, and Mr. Lowe Thereon’, The Nineteenth Century (November 1877), quoted in W. E. Gladstone, Gleanings of Past Years, 1843-1878, Vol. I (1879), p. 158
“I feel with a peculiar sympathy all that relates to Scotland. The natives of Scotland, and all those who have Scotch blood in their veins—particularly if, like me, they only have Scotch blood in their veins—are not apt to forget the country from which they sprang. They know its great qualities. They know the solidity of its character.”
William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) first seen 1878 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech in Westminster Palace Hotel (23 May 1878), quoted in The Times (24 May 1878), p. 12
“Liberty is never safe.”
William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) said by 1898 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Said to the Countess Russell and recorded in her diary, Lady John Russell: A Memoir (1910), edited by Desmond McCarthy and Agatha Russell. p. 252
“[T]he argument of unequal capacity does not tell so uniformly against the more numerous classes of the community as might be supposed. Whether from moral causes, or for whatever other reason, the popular judgment, on a certain number of important questions, is more just than that of the higher order.”
William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) first seen 1843 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: ‘Postscriptum on the County Franchise’, The Nineteenth Century (July 1878), quoted in W. E. Gladstone, Gleanings of Past Years, 1843-1878, Vol. I (1879), p. 198
“As the British Constitution is the most subtile organism which has proceeded from the womb and the long gestation of progressive history, so the American Constitution is, so far as I can see, the most wonderful work ever struck off by the brain and purpose of man.”
William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) said by 1898 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is [America] alone who, at a coming time, can, and probably will, wrest from us that commercial primacy. We have no title, I have no inclination, to murmur at the prospect... We have no more title against her than Venice, or Genoa, or Holland, has had against us.”
William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) first seen 1878 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 'Kin beyond Sea', The North American Review Vol. 127, No. 264 (Sep.-Oct., 1878), p. 180
“National injustice is the surest road to national downfall.”
William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) first seen 1878 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech, Plumstead (30 November 1878) as quoted in Congressional Record, vol. 57, p. 4503
“The disease of an evil conscience is beyond the practice of all the physicians of all the countries in the world.”
William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) first seen 1878 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech, Plumstead (30 November 1878) as quoted in The Annual Register of World Events: A Review of the Year, Volume 120, p. 208
“I think that the principle of the Conservative Party is jealousy of liberty and of the people, only qualified by fear; but I think the principle of the Liberal Party is trust in the people, only qualified by prudence.”
William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) first seen 1878 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech at the opening of the Palmerston Club, Oxford (December 1878) as quoted in "Gladstone's Conundrums; The Statesman Answers Sundry Interesting Questions" in The New York Times (9 February 1879)