Skip to content

To me it is frankly inconceivable that India will ever be fit for Dominion self-government.

— F. E. Smith, 1st Earl of Birkenhead

Another quote →

Topics

Government

More quotes by F. E. Smith, 1st Earl of Birkenhead

Churchill has spent the best years of his life preparing impromptu remarks.

We stand for the State and for the unity which, whether in the form of kingdom or empire or class solidarity, the State alone can bring.

Unionist Policy and Other Essays (1913)

It would be possible to say without exaggeration that the miners' leaders were the stupidest men in England if we had not frequent occasion to meet the owners.

Nature has no cure for this sort of madness, though I have known a legacy from a rich relative work wonders.

We have the highest authority for believing that the meek shall inherit the earth; though I have never found any particular corroboration of this aphorism in the records of Somerset House.

Contemporary Personalities (1924)

All F. E. Smith, 1st Earl of Birkenhead quotes →

You may also like

Ill can he rule the great, that cannot reach the small.

Edmund Spenser The Faerie Queene (1589)

The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse.

James Madison

Bureaucracy and social harmony are inversely proportional to each other.

Leon Trotsky The Revolution Betrayed (1936)

There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.

John Adams

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: F. E. Smith, 1st Earl of Birkenhead (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.