William Ewart Gladstone Quotes

62 Sourced Quotes

I was tenaciously opposed by the governor and deputy-governor of the Bank, who had seats in parliament, and I had the City for an antagonist on almost every occasion.

William Ewart Gladstone
Ireland, Ireland! That cloud in the west! That coming storm! That minister of God's retribution upon cruel, inveterate, and but half-atoned injustice! Ireland forces upon us those great social and great religious questions. God grant that we may have courage to look them in the face!

William Ewart Gladstone
Here is my first principle of foreign policy: good government at home.

William Ewart Gladstone
Never forget that the purpose for which a man lives is the improvement of the man himself, so that he may go out of this world having, in his great sphere or his small one, done some little good for his fellow creatures and labored a little to diminish the sin and sorrow that are in the world.

William Ewart Gladstone
Decision by majorities is as much an expedient as lighting by gas.

William Ewart Gladstone
The love of freedom itself is hardly stronger in England than the love of aristocracy.

William Ewart Gladstone
This is the negation of God erected into a system of Government.

William Ewart Gladstone
Finance is, as it were, the stomach of the country, from which all the other organs take their tone.

William Ewart Gladstone
It is difficult to see anything but infatuation in the destructive temperament which leads to the action...that each of us is to rejoice that our several units are to be distinguished at death into countless millions of organisms; for such, it seems, is the latest revelation delivered from the fragile tripod of a modern Delphi.

William Ewart Gladstone
Welsh nationality is as great a reality as English nationality.

William Ewart Gladstone
It is perfectly true that these gentlemen wish to march through rapine to disintegration and dismemberment of the Empire, and, I am sorry to say, even to the placing of different parts of the Empire in direct hostility one with the other.
On the Irish Land League

William Ewart Gladstone
Books are delightful society. If you go into a room and find it full of books - even without taking them from the shelves they seem to speak to you, to bid you welcome.

William Ewart Gladstone
Human justice is ever lagging after wrong, as the prayers in Homer came limping after sin.

William Ewart Gladstone
But how is the spirit of expenditure to be exorcised? Not by preaching; I doubt if even by yours. I seriously doubt whether it will ever give place to the old spirit of economy, as long as we have the income-tax. There, or hard by, lie questions of deep practical moment.

William Ewart Gladstone
I am thankful to have borne a part in the emancipating labours of the last sixty years; but entirely uncertain how, had I now to begin my life, I could face the very different problems of the next sixty years. Of one thing I am, and always have been, convinced—it is not by the State that man can be regenerated, and the terrible woes of this darkened world effectually dealt with. In some, and some very important, respects, I yearn for the impossible revival of the men and the ideas of my first twenty years, which immediately followed the first Reform Act.

William Ewart Gladstone
There should be a sympathy with freedom, a desire to give it scope, founded not upon visionary ideas, but upon the long experience of many generations within the shores of this happy isle, that in freedom you lay the firmest foundations both of loyalty and order; the firmest foundations for the development of individual character; and the best provision for the happiness of the nation at large.

William Ewart Gladstone
I venture on assuring you that I regard the design formed by you and your friends with sincere interest, and in particular wish well to all the efforts you may make on behalf of individual freedom and independence as opposed to what is termed Collectivism.

William Ewart Gladstone
Former Prime Ministers are like great rafts floating untethered in a harbour.

William Ewart Gladstone
To the actual, as distinct from the reported, strength of the Empire, India adds nothing. She immensely adds to the responsibility of Government.

William Ewart Gladstone
National injustice is the surest road to national downfall.

William Ewart Gladstone
Selfishness is the greatest curse of the human race.

William Ewart Gladstone
[An] Established Clergy will always be a Tory Corps d'Armée.

William Ewart Gladstone
Swimming for his life, a man does not see much of the country through which the river winds.

William Ewart Gladstone
I am certain, from experience, of the immense advantage of strict account-keeping in early life. It is just like learning the grammar then, which when once learned need not be referred to afterwards.

William Ewart Gladstone
The first essential for a Prime Minister is to be a good butcher.

William Ewart Gladstone
There is scarcely a single moral action of a single man of which other men can have such a knowledge, in its ultimate grounds, its surrounding incidents, and the real determining cause of its merits, as to warrant their pronouncing a conclusive judgement upon it.

William Ewart Gladstone
You cannot fight against the future. Time is on our side.

William Ewart Gladstone
I think that the principle of the Conservative Party is jealousy of liberty and of the people, only qualified by fear; but I think the principle of the Liberal Party is trust in the people, only qualified by prudence.

William Ewart Gladstone
I will venture to say, that upon the one great class of subjects, the largest and the most weighty of them all, where the leading and determining considerations that ought to lead to a conclusion are truth, justice, and humanity—upon these, gentlemen, all the world over, I will back the masses against the classes.

William Ewart Gladstone
A rational reaction against the irrational excesses and vagaries of scepticism may, I admit, readily degenerate into the rival folly of credulity. To be engaged in opposing wrong affords, under the conditions of our mental constitution, but a slender guarantee for being right.

William Ewart Gladstone