Stanley Baldwin Quotes

43 Sourced Quotes

A platitude is simply a truth repeated until people get tired of hearing it.

Stanley Baldwin
Tom Mosley is a cad and a wrong 'un and they will find it out.

Stanley Baldwin
When you think about the defense of England you no longer think of the chalk cliffs of Dover. You think of the Rhine. That is where our frontier lies today.

Stanley Baldwin
If I did not believe that our work was done in the faith and hope that at some day, it may be a million years hence, the Kingdom of God will spread over the whole world, I would have no hope, I could do no work, and I would give my office over this morning to anyone who would take it.

Stanley Baldwin
I cannot rival Lloyd George at that sort of speech—full of clever thrusts, innuendos, malicious half-truths. To Lloyd George and Winston [Churchill] it is all part of a game; as for me, I cannot make speeches which are sheer and mere dialectic... If I had made the sort of speech about Lloyd George that I could have made it would be a cruel attack on an old man and it would have done no good. All through his career, except during the War, he has done no end of harm, and his Versailles peace was iniquitous and his conduct after the peace execrable.

Stanley Baldwin
Supposing I had gone to the country [in 1933], and said that Germany was re-arming, and that we must re-arm, does anybody think that this pacific democracy would have rallied to that cry at that moment? I cannot think of anything that would have made the loss of the election from my point of view more certain... we got from the country [in 1935], with a large majority, a mandate for doing a thing no one, twelve months earlier, would have believed possible.

Stanley Baldwin
If there is going to be a war—and no one can say that there is not—we must keep him fresh to be our war Prime Minister.
After excluding Churchill from the Cabinet

Stanley Baldwin
I hate elections, but you have got to have them; they are medicine.

Stanley Baldwin
The die-hard opinions of George III couched in the language of Edmund Burke.

Stanley Baldwin
Let us never forget this – since the day of the air the old frontiers are gone. When you think of the defence of England you no longer think of the chalk cliffs of Dover; you think of the Rhine. That is where our frontier lies.

Stanley Baldwin
He spent his whole life in plastering together the true and the false and therefrom manufacturing the plausible.
Of Lloyd George

Stanley Baldwin
Whatever failures may have come to parliamentary government in countries which have not those traditions, and where it is not a natural growth, that is no proof that parliamentary government has failed.

Stanley Baldwin
There are three classes which need sanctuary more than others—birds, wild flowers, and Prime Ministers.

Stanley Baldwin
Civilisation may perish as the result of war: it would certainly perish as the result of Nazi-ism triumphant beyond the borders of the country of its birth... And now we know that should the challenge come, we shall be there. In Luther's words we can no other. We were there when the Spanish galleons made for Plymouth: we were on those bloody fields in the Netherlands when Louis XIV aimed at the domination of Europe: we were on duty when Napoleon bestrode the world like a demi-god, and we answered the roll call, as you did, in August, 1914. We can no other. So help us, God.

Stanley Baldwin
Do not fear or misunderstand when the Government say they are looking to our defences. I give you my word that there will be no great armaments.

Stanley Baldwin
I should like to make an observation to right honourable and honourable Gentlemen opposite. It is that I do not think they will help to produce the atmosphere in Europe which is so desirable by issuing papers that have been issued by the National Council of Labour, headed 'Hit Hitler'.

Stanley Baldwin
Dictatorship is like a giant beech-tree-very magnificent to look at in its prime, but nothing grows underneath it.

Stanley Baldwin
To me, England is the country, and the country is England. And when I ask myself what I mean by England when I am abroad, England comes to me through my various senses — through the ear, through the eye and through certain imperishable scents … The sounds of England, the tinkle of the hammer on the anvil in the country smithy, the corncrake on a dewy morning, the sound of the scythe against the whetstone, and the sight of a plough team coming over the brow of a hill, the sight that has been seen in England since England was a land … the one eternal sight of England.

Stanley Baldwin
Once I leave, I leave. I am not going to speak to the man on the bridge, and I am not going to spit on the deck.

Stanley Baldwin
Had the employers of past generations all of them dealt fairly with their men there would have been no unions.

Stanley Baldwin
I shall be but a short time tonight. I have seldom spoken with greater regret, for my lips are not yet unsealed. Were these troubles over I would make a case, and I guarantee that not a man would go into the lobby against us.
On the Abyssinian crisis

Stanley Baldwin
I am a man of peace. I am longing and working and praying for peace, but I will not surrender the safety and security of the British constitution. You placed me in power eighteen months ago by the largest majority accorded to any party for many, many years. Have I done anything to forfeit that confidence? Cannot you trust me to ensure a square deal to secure even justice between man and man?

Stanley Baldwin
We none of us know what is going on in that strange man's mind. We all know the German desire as he has come out with in his book [Mein Kampf] to move East, and if he moves East, I shall not break my heart, but that is another thing. I do not believe he wants to move West, because West would be a very difficult programme for him … If there is any fighting in Europe to be done, I should like to see the Bolsheviks and Nazis doing it.

Stanley Baldwin
I knew that I had been chosen as God's instrument for the work of the healing of the nation.

Stanley Baldwin
The greatest crime to our own people is to be afraid to tell the truth … the old frontiers are gone. When you think of the defence of England you no longer think of the chalk cliffs of Dover; you think of the Rhine. That is where it lies.

Stanley Baldwin
This country today [is] the last stronghold of freedom, standing like a rock in a tide that is threatened to submerge the world.

Stanley Baldwin
The real need of the day is … moral and spiritual rearmament … God's Living Spirit can transcend conflicting political systems, can reconcile order and freedom, can rekindle true patriotism, can unite all citizens in the service of the nation, and all nations in the service of mankind.

Stanley Baldwin
It is no ready made article; it has grown through the centuries as native to our country and people as the oak, ash, or thorn. It has given her people freedom and taught them the difference between freedom and licence. That is the Constitution that is threatened today, not quite openly yet, by the Socialist Party in their conference, tendenciously by sketching a course of action which if it takes place means the destruction of the Constitution. You may dispute that as much as you like, but in effect taking away the executive power of the House of Commons is the way every tyranny starts. It is proletarian Hitlerism and nothing else, and it can be nothing else. I want you to realize it in time.

Stanley Baldwin
In none of these countries [Russia, Italy and Germany] was it possible to make to the people such an appeal as went home to the heart of our people, an appeal based on Christianity or ethics … The whole outlook in the dictator countries was so completely different from ours that for a long time people here could not understand how it was possible for these nations not to respond to the same kind of appeal as that to which our people responded. But they were beginning to realise it now... The only argument which appealed to the dictators was that of force.

Stanley Baldwin
"Magna Carta is the Law: Let the King look out."
So it has always been with tyrants among our own people: when the King was tyrant, let him look out. And it has always been the same, and will be the same, whether the tyrant be the Barons, whether the tyrant be the Church, whether he be demagogue or dictator — let them look out.

Stanley Baldwin