Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury Quotes
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The duty was to represent the permanent as opposed to the passing feeling of the English nation.
On the House of Lords
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
Wherever democracy has prevailed, the power of the State has been used in some form or other to plunder the well-to-do classes for the benefit of the poor.
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
No one is fit to be trusted with a secret who is not prepared, if necessary, to tell an untruth to defend it.
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
I wish party government was at the bottom of the sea. It is only insincerity codified.
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
What with deafness, ignorance of French, and Bismarck's extraordinary mode of speech, Beaconsfield has the dimmest idea of what is going on—understands everything crossways—and imagines a perpetual conspiracy.
On the Congress of Berlin
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
It is right to be forward in the defence of the poor; no system that is not just as between rich and poor can hope to survive.
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
To those who have found breakfast with difficulty and do not know where to find dinner, intricate questions of politics are a matter of comparatively secondary interest.
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
Where property is in question I am guilty…of erecting individual liberty as an idol, and of resenting all attempts to destroy or fetter it; but when you pass from liberty to life, in no well-governed State, in no State governed according to the principles of common humanity, are the claims of mere liberty allowed to endanger the lives of the citizens.
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
[Property furnishes] almost the only motive power of agitation. A violent political movement (setting aside those where religious controversy is at work) is generally only an indication that a class of those who have little see their way to getting more by means of a political convulsion.
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
There are marks of hurry which in so old a man are inexplicable. I suppose he still cherishes his belief in an early monastic retreat from this wicked world—and is feverishly anxious to annihilate all his enemies before he takes it.
On gladstone
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
It is said,—and men seem to think that condemnation can go no further than such a censure—that they brought us within twenty-four hours of revolution... But is it in truth so great an evil, when the dearest interests and the most sincere convictions are at stake, to go within twenty-four hours of revolution?
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
First-rate men will not canvass mobs; and if they did, the mobs would not elect the first-rate men.
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
The witness of history is uniform to this, that Nemesis may spare the sagacious criminal, but never fails to overtake the weak, the undecided and the over-charitable fool.
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
... the central doctrine of Conservatism, that it is better to endure almost any political evil than to risk a breach of the historic continuity of government.
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
When great men get drunk with a theory, it is the little men who have the headache.
On political theorists
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
One of the nuisances of the ballot is that when the oracle has spoken you never know what it means.
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
