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William Ewart Gladstone Quotes
1809–1898 England
William Ewart Gladstone (29 December 1809 – 19 May 1898) was a British Liberal politician and Prime Minister (1868–1874, 1880–1885, 1886 and 1892–1894). He was a notable political reformer, known for his populist speeches, and was for many years the main political rival of Benjamin Disraeli.
England Academics Non-fiction authors Politicians Theologians Also known as: Gladstone, Gladstone, William Ewart, William E. Gladstone, William Gladstone
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72 quotes
Protectionism and militarism are united in an unholy but yet a valid marriage: and the one and the other are in my firm conviction alike the foes of freedom.
Public economy is part of public virtue.
What are the qualities which fit a man for the exercise of a privilege such as the franchise? Self-command, self-control, respect for order, patience under suffering, confidence in the law, regard for superiors.
I have even the hope that...the sense of justice which abides tenaciously in the masses will never knowingly join hands with the Fiend of Jingoism.
I am a Free Trader on moral no less than on economic grounds: for I think human greed and selfishness are interwoven with every thread of the Protective system.
A rational reaction against the irrational excesses and vagaries of scepticism may, I admit, readily degenerate into the rival folly of credulity. To be engaged in opposing wrong affords, under the conditions of our mental constitution, but a slender guarantee for being right.
Homeric Synchronism : An Enquiry Into the Time and Place of Homer (1876)
Individual servitude, however abject, will not satisfy the Latin Church. The State must also be a slave.
Economy is the first and great article (economy such as I understand it) in my financial creed. The controversy between direct and indirect taxation holds a minor, though important place.
Letter to his brother Robertson of the Financial Reform Association at Liverpool (1859)
As the British Constitution is the most subtile organism which has proceeded from the womb and the long gestation of progressive history, so the American Constitution is, so far as I can see, the most wonderful work ever struck off by the brain and purpose of man.
Nonconformity...still supplies, to so great an extent, the backbone of British Liberalism.
I am fundamentally a dead man: one fundamentally a Peel–Cobden man.
Not a drop of blood runs in my veins except Scotch blood, and a large share of my heart ever has belonged, and ever will belong, to Scotland.
In 1880, Midlothian leading the way, the nation nobly answered to the call of justice and [br]oadly recognised the brotherhood of man. It was the nation, not the classes.
At last, my friends, I am come amongst you. And I am come…unmuzzled.
As to his Goddess Reason, I understand by it simply an adoption of what are called on the continent the principles of the French Revolution. These we neither want nor warmly relish in England.
Hephaistos bears in Homer the double stamp of a Nature-Power, representing the element of fire, and of an anthropomorphic deity who is the god of art at a period when the only fine art known was in works of metal produced by the aid of fire.
Jeventus Mundi: The Gods and Men of the Heroic Age (1870)
What did the two words "Liberty and Empire" mean in the Roman mouth? They meant simply this: liberty for ourselves, empire over the rest of mankind.
We are not to judge individuals hastily on account of social mischiefs, that may be due to them as a body, through their holding of a position inherited from their forefathers, the whole nature of which they have not had strength and depth of wisdom to detect.
I would tell them of my own intention to keep my counsel...and I will venture to recommend them, as an old Parliamentary hand, to do the same.
I have said, and I say again, "Remember Mitchelstown".
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