Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury Quotes
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English policy is to float lazily downstream, occasionally putting out a diplomatic boat-hook to avoid collisions.
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
... institutions like the House of Lords must die, like all other organic beings, when their time comes.
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
The just Nemesis which generally decrees that partisans shall be forced to do in office precisely that which they most loudly decried in opposition.
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
A Government which is strong enough to hold its own will generally command an acquiescence which with all but very speculative minds, is the equivalent of contentment.
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
... though it is England's right to enforce the law of Europe [i. e. treaties] as between contending states, she has no claim, so long as her own interests are untouched, to interfere in the national affairs of any country, whatever the extent of its misgovernment or its anarchy.
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
Parliament is a potent engine, and its enactments must always do something, but they very seldom do what the originators of these enactments meant. [Therefore most legislation] will have the effect of surrounding the industry which it touches with precautions and investigations, inspections and regulations, in which it will be slowly enveloped and stifled.
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
An emotion will shoot electrically through a crowd which might have appealed to each man by himself in vain.
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
... that shapeless, formless, fibreless mass of platitudes which in official cant is called "unsectarian religion".
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
First rate men will not canvas mobs: and mobs will not elect first rate men.
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
I had secretly indulged the hope that we should be beaten in this election. A spell in Opposition is so good for bracing up the Conservative fibre of our party.
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
I would have devoted my whole efforts to securing the waterway to India – by the acquisition of Egypt or of Crete, and would in no way have discouraged the obliteration of Turkey.
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
... the vista of an age of security and peace – disbanded armaments, forgotten jealousies, immunity not only from the scourge but from the panic of war; pleasant dreams, constantly belied by experience, constantly renewed by theorists, but too closely linked to the hopes of all who believe either in material progress or in the promises of religion ever to be abandoned as chimera.
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
I wish the English army may be equal to all the work his peace-loving policy has given it.
Of gladstone
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
To defend a bad policy as an 'error of judgement' does not excuse it—the right functioning of a man's judgement is his most fundamental responsibility.
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
There is not such thing as a fixed policy, because policy like all organic entities is always in the making.
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
When a man says that he agrees with me in principle, I am quite certain that he does not agree with me in practice.
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
The days and weeks of screwed-up smiles and laboured courtesy, the mock geniality, the hearty shake of the filthy hand, the chuckling reply that must be made to the coarse joke, the loathsome, choking compliment that must be paid to the grimy wife and sluttish daughter, the indispensable flattery of the vilest religious prejudices, the wholesale deglutition of hypocritical pledges.
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
If I were asked to define Conservative policy, I should say that it was the upholding of confidence.
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
The struggle for power in our day lies not between Crown and people, or between a caste of nobles and a bourgeoisie, but between the classes who have property and the classes who have none.
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
Conciliatory legislation only conciliates when there is a full belief on the part of those with whom you are dealing that you are acting on a principle of justice and not on motives of fear.
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
