Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury Quotes

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If I had to do literary work of an absorbing character, Oxford is the last place in which I should attempt to do it.

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
I earnestly hope that the House of Lords will always continue to justify your confidence; that it will conscientiously and firmly fulfil the duties for which I think it is eminently fitted, and which are to represent the permanent and enduring wishes of the nation as opposed to the casual impulses which some passing victory at the polls may in some circumstances have given to the decisions of the other House.

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
A party whose mission is to live entirely upon the discovery of grievances are apt to manufacture the element upon which they subsist.

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
I am an utter unbeliever that anything that is violent will have permanent results.

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
... the gentleness, the concessions, the morbid tenderness of Louis XVI had only tended to precipitate his own and his people's doom, and aggravate the ferocity of those he tried by kindness to disarm.

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
The Admiralty will continue to follow the progress of science at a respectful distance, always arriving at an appreciation of each successive invention just soon enough to find that it is obsolete, and never yielding their adhesion to anything new until the time has come to defend it against the claims of something newer.

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
... this,—which is called self-government, but is really government by the majority,—works admirably when it is confided to people who are of Teutonic race, but... does not work so well when people of other races are called upon to join in it.

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
In a carefully balanced structure like the European system of nations, each State has a vested right in the complete and real independence of its neighbour.

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
One of the difficulties about great thinkers is that they so often think wrong.

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
Social stability is ensured, not by the cessation of the demand for change – for the needy and the restless will never cease to cry for it – but by the fact that change in its progress must at last hurt some class of men who are strong enough to arrest it. The army of so-called reform, in every stage of its advance, necessarily converts a detachment of its force into opponents. The more rapid the advance the more formidable will the desertion become, till at last a point will be reached where the balance between the forces of conservation and destruction will be redressed, and the political equilibrium be restored.

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
Directly man has satisfied his most elementary material wants, the first aspiration of his amiable heart is for the privilege of being able to look down upon his neighbours.

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
Of intervening in the domestic affairs of foreign states:
There is no practice which the experience of nations more uniformly condemns, and none which governments more consistently pursue.

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
The agonies of a man who has to finish a difficult negotiation, and at the same time to entertain four royalties at a country house can be better imagined than described.

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
No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you never should trust experts. If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require to have their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
There is nothing dramatic in the success of a diplomatist. His victories are made up of a series of microscopic advantages: of a judicious suggestion here, or an opportune civility there: of a wise concession at one moment, and a farsighted persistence at another; of sleepless tact, immovable calmness, and patience that no folly, no provocation, no blunders can shake.
On Lord Castlereagh

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
I have a profound distrust of government inspectors, and I am generally disposed to find them wrong.

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
As I have said, there are two points or two characteristics of the Radical programme which it is your special duty to resist. One concerns the freedom of individuals. After all, the great characteristic of this country is that it is a free country, and by a free country I mean a country where people are allowed, so long as they do not hurt their neighbours, to do as they like. I do not mean a country where six men may make five men do exactly as they like. That is not my notion of freedom.

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
I do believe politicians would be far more ready to resign office if they did not feel that their doing so would give such infinite pleasure to their adversaries.

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
... when I am told that my ploughmen are capable citizens, it seems to me ridiculous to say that educated women are not just as capable. A good deal of the political battle of the future will be a conflict between religion and unbelief: & the women will in that controversy be on the right side.

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
We have been engaged in drawing lines upon maps where no white man's foot has ever trod. We have been giving away mountains and rivers and lakes to each other, only hindered by the small impediment that we never knew exactly where the mountains and rivers and lakes were.

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
It is a Party shackled by tradition; all the cautious people, all the timid, all the unimaginative, belong to it. It stumbles slowly and painfully from precedent to precedent with its eyes fixed on the ground.
Of the Conservative Party

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
People imagine that where an evil exists, the Queen, the Lords and the Commons should stop it. I wonder they have not brought in an Act of Parliament to stop unfavourable weather on the occasion of political demonstrations.

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
English policy is to float lazily downstream, occasionally putting out a diplomatic boat-hook to avoid collisions.

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
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