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Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury Quotes
1830–1903 England
Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (3 February 1830 – 22 August 1903), styled Lord Robert Cecil before the death of his elder brother in 1865, and Viscount Cranborne from June 1865 until his father died in April 1868, was a three-time Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, during 1885–1886, 1886–1892 and 1895–1902.
Also known as: Lord Salisbury, Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, 3d Marquess of Salisbury, Robert Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
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A gram of experience is worth a ton of theory.
First-rate men will not canvass mobs; and if they did, the mobs would not elect the first-rate men.
Conflict in free states is the law of life.
You may roughly divide the nations of the world as the living and the dying.
War is righteous or unrighteous according as it is opportune or inopportune.
With his hand upon the throttle-valve of crime.
Parliament is a potent engine, and its enactments must always do something, but they very seldom do what the originators of these enactments meant.
A party whose mission is to live entirely upon the discovery of grievances are apt to manufacture the element upon which they subsist.
The struggle for power in our day lies not between Crown and people, or between a caste of nobles and a bourgeoisie, but between the classes who have property and the classes who have none.
On Tory principles the case presents much that is painful, but no perplexity whatever. Ireland must be kept, like India, at all hazards: by persuasion if possible; if not, by force.
The vast multitudes of India I thoroughly believe are well contented with our rule. They have changed masters so often that there is nothing humiliating to them in having gained a new one.
Mohammedanism has the only organization and pretty nearly the only ambition hostile to us that is left in India.
Wherever democracy has prevailed, the power of the State has been used in some form or other to plunder the well-to-do classes for the benefit of the poor.
If I were asked to define Conservative policy, I should say that it was the upholding of confidence.
There is no danger which we have to contend with which is so serious as an exaggeration of the power, the useful power, of the interference of the State.
Just conceive what London would be without the Empire. It would be a collection of multitudes, without employment, without industrial hope, sinking down into misery and decay.
On reflection, I am convinced that turbulence as well as every other evil temper of this evil age belongs not to the lower but to the middle classes.
Englishmen are moderate, careful to avoid unnecessary offence, slow to come to a dangerous and violent conclusion, and tenacious and resolute when the conclusion has once been arrived at.
No one would dream of surrendering any practical security, for the advantages of which he is actually in possession, in deference of the a priori jurisprudence of a whole Academy of philosophers.
The elective principle—government by representation—is not an Eastern idea; it does not fit Eastern traditions or Eastern minds.
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