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George Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston Quotes
1859–1925
George Nathaniel Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston, (11 January 1859 – 20 March 1925), known as The Lord Curzon of Kedleston between 1898 and 1911 and as The Earl Curzon of Kedleston between 1911 and 1921, was a British Conservative statesman who was Viceroy of India and Foreign Secretary, but who was passed over as Prime Minister in 1923 in favour of Stanley Baldwin. The Curzon Line was named after him.
Also known as: George Curzon, Lord Curzon
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Such is the street life of Peking, a phantasmagoria of excruciating incident, too bewildering to grasp, too aggressive to acquiesce in, too absorbing to escape.
Problems of the Far East: Japan–Korea–China (1894)
The British people realise that they are fighting for the hegemony of the Empire. If necessary we shall continue the war single-handed.
As long as we rule India we are the greatest Power in the world. If we lose it, we shall drop straight away to a third-rate Power.
[Frenchmen] are not the sort of people one would go tiger-shooting with.
The obstacle has been Mackenzie King, the Canadian, who is both obstinate, tiresome and stupid.
The strength and omnipotence of England everywhere in the East is amazing. No other country or people is to be compared with her. We control everything, and are liked as well as respected and feared.
Letter to his father from Singapore (1887)
Not even a public figure. A man of no experience. And of the utmost insignificance. The utmost insignificance.
Never let it be forgotten that the result of the Mutiny was not merely an England victorious, but an India pacified, united, and started once more upon a wondrous career of advance and expansion.
No one believes more firmly than we do that the safety and welfare of India depend on the permanence of British administration.
Letter to Lord Minto (1907)
If I had done nothing else in India I have written my name here, and the letters are a living joy.
As a pilgrim at the shrine of beauty I have visited them, but as a priest in the temple of duty have I charged myself with their reverent custody and their studious repair.
Rightly or wrongly, it appears to me that the continued existence of this country is bound up in the maintenance—aye I will go further and say even in the extension of the British Empire.
I have never wavered in a strict and inflexible justice between the two races. It is the sole justification and the only stable foundation for our rule.
[Japan is] a restless and aggressive Power, full of energy, somewhat like the Germans in mentality, seeking in every direction to push out and find an outlet for her ambitions.
But it does matter to us and to the entire world a great deal that men have been found in this as in earlier and perhaps more virile ages to run great risks for a great idea, to count life itself as dust in the balance compared with supreme human endeavour, and to meet death without repining even on the threshold of victory and fame.
Placed at a maritime coign of vantage upon the flank of Asia, precisely analogous to that occupied by Great Britain on the flank of Europe, exercising a powerful influence over the adjoining continent, but not necessarily involved in its responsibilities, she [Japan] sets before herself the supreme ambition of becoming, on a smaller scale, the Britain of the Far East.
Problems of the Far East: Japan–Korea–China (1894)
We are ordained to walk here in the same track together for many a long day to come. You cannot do without us. We should be impotent without you. Let the Englishman and the Indian accept the consecration of a union that is so mysterious as to have in it something of the divine, and let our common ideal be a united country and a happier people.
[The Indian Empire is] the biggest thing that the English are doing anywhere in the world.
[The Indian Empire is] the miracle of the world.
It is only when you get to see and realise what India is—that she is the strength and the greatness of England—it is only then that you feel that every nerve a man may strain, every energy he may put forward, cannot be devoted to a nobler purpose than keeping tight the cords that hold India to ourselves.
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