Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury Quotes

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... if our ancestors had cared for the rights of other people, the British empire would not have been made.

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
A highly-paid chairman is a luxury which should be reserved for the return of a good shareholders' dividend.

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
To give 'the suffrage' to a poor man is to give him as large a part in determining that legislation which is mainly concerned with property as the banker whose name is known on every Exchange in Europe, as the merchant whose ships are in every sea, as the landowner who owns the soil of a whole manufacturing town... two day-labourers shall outvote Baron Rothschild... The bestowal upon any class of a voting power disproportionate to their stake in the country, must infallibly give that class a power pro tanto of using taxation as an instrument of plunder, and expenditure and legislation as a fountain of gain.

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
We are not the same people that we have been, either in our social characteristics, in our patriotic sentiments, or in the tone of our moral and religious feelings.

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
It is the same with all efforts to root up any evil by the expenditure of money. To attach a money value to the existence of an evil, even for the purpose of extirpating it, can have no other end than that of multiplying the evil.

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
In the real business of life no one troubles himself much about 'moral titles'. No one would dream of surrendering any practical security, for the advantages of which he is actually in possession, in deference of the a priori jurisprudence of a whole Academy of philosophers.

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
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
I am an utter unbeliever that anything that is violent will have permanent results.

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
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
Dizzy intends to pursue the old game of talking Green in the House and Orange in the Lobby.

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
We might as well hope for the termination of the struggle for existence by which, some philosophers tell us, the existence or the modification of the various species of organized beings upon our planet are determined. The battle for political power is merely an effort, well or ill-judged, on the part of the classes who wage it to better or to secure their own position. Unless our social activity shall have become paralyzed, and the nation shall have lost its vitality, this battle must continue to rage. In this sense the question of reform, that is to say, the question of relative class power, can never be settled.

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
On general grounds I object to Parliament trying to regulate private morality in matters which only affects the person who commits the offence.

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
No man was ever so yielding without ever being weak, or so stern without being obstinate.
Of William Pitt the Younger

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
Wherever it has had free play in the ancient world or in the modern, in the old hemisphere or the new, a thirst for empire, and a readiness for aggressive war, has always marked it.

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
She has given us foreign invasions, domestic rebellions; and in quieter times the manly sport of landlord shooting.
On Ireland

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
... the common sense of Christendom has always prescribed for national policy principles diametrically opposed to those that are laid down in the Sermon on the Mount.

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
Possession of Ireland is our peculiar punishment, our unique affliction, among the family of nations. What crime have we committed, with what particular vice is our national character chargeable, that this chastisement should have befallen us?

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
An indiscreet admirer is a far more intolerable nuisance than an acrimonious enemy.

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
They who have the absolute power of preventing lamentable events, and knowing what is taking place, refuse to exercise that power, are responsible for what happens.

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
Opinions upon moral questions are more often the expression of strongly felt expediency than of careful ethical reasoning; and the opinions so formed by one generation become the conscientious convictions or the sacred instincts of the next.

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
Not the number of noses, but the magnitude of interests, should furnish the elements by which the proportion of representation should be computed... The classes that represent civilisation, the holders of accumulated capital and accumulated thought have a right to require securities to protect them from being overwhelmed by hordes who have neither knowledge to guide them nor stake in the Commonwealth to control them.

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
Salisbury said two things which are more decided than any former utterances of his: that Russia at Constantinople would do us no harm: and that we ought to seize Egypt.

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury