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Arthur Balfour Quotes
1848–1930 Scotland
Arthur James Balfour, 1st Earl of Balfour, KG, OM, PC (25 July 1848 – 19 March 1930) was a British Conservative statesman and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1902 until 1905. The author of several influential works of philosophy, he was one of the most intellectual prime ministers of the 20th century.
Scotland Philosophers Politicians Also known as: Arthur James, Earl of Balfour
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24 quotes
Most terrible of all the terrible Turks.
The General Strike has taught the working classes more in four days than years of talking could have done.
It is unfortunate, considering that enthusiasm moves the world, that so few enthusiasts can be trusted to speak the truth.
Biography should be written by an acute enemy.
Science preceded the theory of science, and is independent of it. Science preceded naturalism, and will survive it.
The Foundations of Belief (1895)
Our whole political machinery presupposes a people so fundamentally at one that they can safely afford to bicker.
Fairly well, but it is like talking to a lot of tombstones.
We now know too much about matter to be materialists.
I have never had to go back beyond the year 1885 to prove that the Irish leaders desired to obtain what they call the freedom of their country by illegal and anarchic means.
Few persons are prevented from thinking themselves right by the reflection that, if they be right, the rest of the world is wrong.
There is always something about our feeling for beautiful things which can neither be described nor communicated, which is unshared and unshareable.
Logic always seems to be telling us, in language quite unnecessarily technical, what we understood much better before it was explained.
...the great Unionist party shall still control, whether in power or whether in opposition, the destinies of this great Empire.
There are those who talk as if Irishmen were justified in disobeying the law because the law comes to them in a foreign garb. I see no reason why any local colour should be given to the Ten Commandments.
Here we have values which by supposition we are reluctant to lose. Neither scientific observation nor sober sense can preserve them. It is surely permissible to ask what will.
Whether an independent Bohemia would be strong enough to hold her own, from a military as well as from a commercial point of view, against Teutonic domination—surrounded as she is at present entirely by German influence—I do not know.
Everything that happened, good or bad, would subtract something from the lessening store of useful energy, till a time arrived when nothing could happen any more, and the universe, frozen into eternal repose, would for ever be as if it were not.
Those who look forward to a period of continuous and, so to speak, inevitable progress, are bound to assign some more solid reason for their convictions than a merely empirical survey of the surface lessons of history. ...Humanity, civilisation, progress itself, must have a tendency to mitigate the harsh methods by which Nature has wrought out the variety and the perfection of organic life.
A Fragment on Progress (1891)
...this Home Rule Bill is an experiment in Federalism of the most impossible, unexampled, and preposterous character.
He did not believe that any such transaction could be quoted from the annals of our political or Parliamentary history. It stood alone—he did not wish to use strong language, but he was going to say—it stood alone in its infamy.
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