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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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It is the place where Collectivist and Socialistic experiments are tried. It is the place where a new revolutionary spirit finds its instruments and collects its arms.
It is right to be forward in the defence of the poor; no system that is not just as between rich and poor can hope to survive.
I have said for years that I always thought that when I knew what the Queen thought I knew pretty certainly what view her subjects would take, and especially the middle classes of her subjects.
We are a Teutonic people. We hold steadily to our opinions.
Diplomacy which does not rest on force is the most feeble and futile of weapons, and except for bare self-defence, we have not the force.
There can be no finality in politics.
On general grounds I object to Parliament trying to regulate private morality in matters which only affects the person who commits the offence.
Letter to Sir Henry Peek (1888)
A Government which is strong enough to hold its own will generally command an acquiescence which with all but very speculative minds, is the equivalent of contentment.
We are not the same people that we have been, either in our social characteristics, in our patriotic sentiments, or in the tone of our moral and religious feelings.
No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe.
Moderation, especially in the matter of territory, has never been characteristic of democracy. Wherever it has had free play, in the ancient world or in the modern, in the old hemisphere or the new, a thirst for empire, and a readiness for aggressive war, has always marked it.
I believe there is a great deal of Villa Toryism which requires organization.
Salisbury said two things which are more decided than any former utterances of his: that Russia at Constantinople would do us no harm: and that we ought to seize Egypt.
English policy is to float lazily downstream, occasionally putting out a diplomatic boat-hook to avoid collisions.
The commonest error in politics is sticking to the carcass of dead policies.
It is clear enough that the traditional Palmerstonian policy [of British support for Ottoman territorial integrity] is at an end.
[I]f our ancestors had cared for the rights of other people, the British empire would not have been made.
[T]hat shapeless, formless, fibreless mass of platitudes which in official cant is called "unsectarian religion".
England is, I believe, the only country in which during a great war eminent men write and speak publicly as if they belonged to the enemy.
As to action the matter is simple: India is held by the sword: and its rulers must in all essentials be guided by the maxims which benefit the Government of the sword.
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