John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn Quotes
1838–1923 England
Also known as: John Morley, Morley, John
Random John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn quote
44 quotes
You cannot demonstrate an emotion or prove an aspiration.
Rousseau (1876)
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.
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.
I shall not flinch if they decapitate or flagellate all the bishops and curés in Paris.
I don't like that hateful heresy, proportional representation.
Liberalism, as we have known it, is dead beyond resurrection.
I am as cautious a Whig as any Elliot, Russell, or Grey, that was ever born.
As for progress, what signs of it are there now? And all we Victorians believed in it from the Utilitarians onwards.
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.
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.
Ireland and Russia are the two most ‘Christian’ countries in Europe. To-day they are the most disfigured by violence and outrage. What do you make of that?
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.
My only consolation has been to read up the history of Ireland in Lecky and our abominable treatment of her. All the faults of the Irish character are traceable to that.
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.
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.)
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!
They who tamper with veracity, from whatever motive, are tampering with the vital force of human progress. Our comfort and the delight of the religious imagination are no better than forms of self-indulgence, when they are secured at the cost of that love of truth on which, more than on anything else, the increase of light and happiness among men must depend.
On Compromise (1908)
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.
[I] always had a soft place in my heart for the patrician Whigs.
Theology has borrowed, and coloured for her own use, the principles which were first brought into vogue in politics. If in the one field it is the fashion to consider convenience first and truth second, in the other there is a corresponding fashion of placing truth second and emotional comfort first.
On Compromise (1908)