Edward Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax Quotes

19 Sourced Quotes

Gratitude is one of those things that cannot be bought. It must be born with men, or else all the obligations in the world will not create it.

Edward Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax
Formality is sufficiently revenged upon the world for being so unreasonably laughed at; it is destroyed, it is true, but it hath the spiteful satisfaction of seeing everything destroyed with it.

Edward Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax
There is an accumulative cruelty in a number of men, though none in particular are ill natured.

Edward Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax
A fool hath no dialogue within himself, the first thought carrieth him without the reply of a second.

Edward Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax
Power is so apt to be insolent and Liberty to be saucy, that they are seldom upon good Terms.

Edward Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax
The several sorts of religion in the world are little more than so many spiritual monopolies.

Edward Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax
Hope is generally a wrong guide, though it is very good company by the way.

Edward Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax
A man that should call everything by its right name would hardly pass the streets without being knocked down as a common enemy.

Edward Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax
[The Hore-Laval proposals] were not so frightfully different from those put forward by the Committee of Five. But the latter were of respectable parentage: and the Paris ones were too much like the off-the-stage arrangements of nineteenth-century diplomacy.

Edward Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax
Nothing was more likely to aggravate the difficulties of the present situation than any suggestions that our ultimate objective was to unite France, Italy and ourselves against Germany.

Edward Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax
Instead of deluding public opinion with a notion that a sufficient application of force will provide a remedy, a wiser course would be to set about taking such steps as may be the means of recovering that consent without which society in Ireland cannot exist...[an offer should be made to the Irish] conceived on the most generous lines.

Edward Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax
If none were to have liberty but those who understand what it is, there would not be many freed men in the world.

Edward Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax
[It is] a question of personal appeal and conviction, rather than any argument. The cards I fancy are sympathy, understanding of his hopes, suspicions and disappointments, but above all, striving to convey to him, through what one says, a real echo of the sincerity that pervaded your doings in London.

Edward Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax
True merit, like a river, the deeper it is, the less noise it makes.

Edward Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax
Though I am, as you know, a pacifist by nature, I am not disposed to go to all lengths to meet people who seem to be behaving with utter unreason.

Edward Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax
Lord Rochester was made Lord president: which being a post superior in rank, but much inferior both in advantage and credit to that he held formerly, drew a jest from Lord Halifax…he had heard of many kicked down stairs, but never of any that was kicked up stairs before.

Edward Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax
In corrupted governments the place is given for the sake of the man; in good ones the man is chosen for the sake of the place.

Edward Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax
In response to a journalist who asked him if the late-night Munich crisis meetings were wearing him out:
No, not exactly. But it spoils one's eye for the high birds.

Edward Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax
In the name of Indian national life, in the name of religion, I appeal to all in each of the two countries who hold position... let them begin each in their own community to work untiringly towards this end: boldly to repudiate feelings of hatred and intolerance, actively to condemn and suppress acts of violence and aggression, earnestly to strive to exorcise suspicions... I appeal in the name of national life because communal tension is eating into it as a canker... I appeal in the name of religion because I can appeal to nothing nobler, and because religion is the language of the soul, and it is a change of soul that India needs today.

Edward Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax