British Politician Quotes

I could never make out what those damned dots meant.

Lord Randolph Churchill

The poverty and unemployment which we came into existence to fight have been largely conquered

The applications of science are not difficult, but without the science there are no applications.

Lyon Playfair, 1st Baron Playfair

The tendency everywhere in America to concentrate power and responsibility in one man is unmistakable.

I have got an infamous army, very weak and ill-equipped, and a very inexperienced staff.

Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington

In the last Parliament, the House of Commons had more MPs called John than all the women MPs put together.

Inconvenience arising from the operation of an Act of Parliament can be no ground of argument in a Court of law.

Richard Arden, 1st Baron Alvanley

The worst enemy of science is also the bitterest enemy of democracy, cest le clericalisme. The interests of science and the interests of democracy are one.

The homosexual Tom Driberg complaining about his wife to his friends:

She broke her marriage vows; she tried to sleep with me.

People in this country have had enough of experts.

Each successive Labour Government has been the most rapacious, doctrinaire and unpatriotic conspiracy to be seen this side of the Iron Curtain.

I do not believe there is a long-term future for the privately rented sector in its present form.

Anthony Crosland

This country is not the free-trading nation it once was. We have become too lazy, and too fat on our successes in previous generations, companies who could be contributing to our national prosperity - but choose not to because it might be too difficult or too time-consuming or because they can't play golf on a Friday afternoon - we've got to be saying to them if you want to share in the prosperity of our country you have a duty to contribute to the prosperity of our country.

The real truth is, the number of convicts is too overwhelming for the means of proper and effectual punishment. I despair of any remedy but that which I wish I could hope for - a great reduction in the amount of crime.

To state as clearly as may be what means lie ready to develop a property-owning democracy, to bring the industrial and economic status of the wage-earner abreast of his political and educational, to make democracy stable and four-square.

In the large animals, you see And own a wise economy - Without their aids, Man's boundless sway You feel would languish and decay.

Thomas Erskine, 1st Baron Erskine

Continually measuring women's wants by men's achievements seems out of date, ignominious, and intolerably boring.... Now that we have secured possession of the tools of citizenship, we intend to use them not to copy men's models but to produce our own.

Eleanor Rathbone

There is a glut of chemical books, but a scarcity of chemical truths.

John French, 1st Earl of Ypres

Denis Healey: Can he assure us there is no question of American military intervention as this could only make the situation worse?
Sir Geoffrey Howe: There is no question of that.

Politicians are like monkeys. The higher they climb, the more revolting are the parts they expose.

Gwilym Lloyd George, 1st Viscount Tenby

Truth is suppressed, not to protect the country from enemy agents but to protect the Government of the day against the people.

English physicians kill you, the French let you die.

William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne

If you lived in Sheffield and were called Sebastian, you had to learn to run fast at a very early stage.

Derision is never so agonizing as when it pounces on the wanderings of misguided sensibility.

Francis Jeffrey, Lord Jeffrey

The archbishop [Archbishop Runcie] is usually to be found nailing his colors to the fence.