Rab Butler Quotes

11 Sourced Quotes

In politics you must always keep running with the pack. The moment that you falter and they sense that you are injured, the rest will turn on you like wolves.

Rab Butler
The good clean tradition of English politics, that of Pitt as opposed to Fox, has been sold to the greatest adventurer of modern political history.
On the appointment of Churchill as Prime Minister

Rab Butler
That's the trouble with Anthony—half mad baronet, half beautiful woman.
Of Anthony Eden

Rab Butler
Ah yes, the foreign affairs debate. Dear Anthony will make the speech which dear Anthony always makes so well.
On Anthony Eden

Rab Butler
Truly Conservative policies [are] freeing markets, freeing the economy, giving the economy buoyancy, moving to liberty and the desirable goal of freeing payments and trade.

Rab Butler
I think a Prime Minister has to be a butcher and know the joints. That is perhaps where I have not been quite competent, in knowing all the ways that you can cut up a carcass.

Rab Butler
In the past three years we have burned our identity cards, torn up our ration books, halved the number of of snoopers, decimated the number of forms and said good riddance to nearly two-thirds of the remaining wartime regulations. This is the march to freedom on which we are bound. And the pace must quicken as we go forward... Within the limits of law and social justice, our aim is freedom for every man and woman to live their own lives in their own way and not have their lives lived for them by an overweening State.

Rab Butler
Politics is the Art of the Possible. That is what these pages show I have tried to achieve—not more—and that is what I have called my book.

Rab Butler
We should emerge from the rearmament period with inadequate reserves, with no assurance of further U.S. aid, with our export markets reduced, with a continuous and possibly increased claim on our resources for defence, with German and Japanese competition at full blast and finally, with industrial efficiency in a relatively worse position compared with the United States than it is now.

Rab Butler
The Civil Service is a bit like a Rolls-Royce—you know it's the best machine in the world, but you're not quite sure what to do with it.

Rab Butler
Many a time I have sat in the jungle in Central India watching a bait, in the form of a bullock or calf tied to a tree, awaiting the arrival of the lord of the forest, and put there as a trap to entice him to his doom. On this occasion, I have exactly the same feelings as those of the miserable animal whom I have so often looked upon in that position, and, if I compare myself to that bait, I may compare my right hon. Friend the Member for Epping (Mr. Churchill) to the tiger. I hope that hon. Members and the right hon. Gentleman himself will remember, however, that there is waiting for the tiger a pair of lynx eyes and a sure and safe rifle to ensure his ultimate fate.

Rab Butler