Benjamin Disraeli: Nationality (page 2)

Benjamin Disraeli was British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister. Explore interesting quotes on nationality.
Benjamin Disraeli: 612   quotes 320   likes

“Gentlemen, the Tory party, unless it is a national party, is nothing.”

Source: Speech at banquet of the National Union of Conservative and Constitutional Associations, Crystal Palace, London (24 June 1872), cited in "Mr. Disraeli at Sydenham," The Times (25 June 1872), p. 7.

“Without publicity there can be no public spirit, and without public spirit every nation must decay.”

Source: Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1871/aug/08/third-reading in the House of Commons (8 August 1871).

“There are rare instances when the sympathy of a nation approaches those tenderer feelings which are generally supposed to be peculiar to the individual, and to be the happy privilege of private life, and this is one.”

Addressing the House of Commons after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln (1 May 1865).
1860s
Context: There are rare instances when the sympathy of a nation approaches those tenderer feelings which are generally supposed to be peculiar to the individual, and to be the happy privilege of private life, and this is one. Under any circumstances we should have bewailed the catastrophe at Washington; under any circumstances we should have shuddered at the means by which it was accomplished. But in the character of the victim, and even in the accessories of his last moments, there is something so homely and innocent, that it takes the question, as it were, out of all the pomp of history and the ceremonial of diplomacy; it touches the heart of nations, and appeals to the domestic sentiment of mankind.
Whatever the various and varying opinions in this House, and in the country generally, on the policy of the late President of the United States, all must agree that in one of the severest trials which ever tested the moral qualities of man he fulfilled his duty with simplicity and strength. …When such crimes are perpetrated the public mind is apt to fall into gloom and perplexity, for it is ignorant alike of the causes and the consequences of such deeds. But it is one of our duties to reassure them under unreasoning panic and despondency. Assassination has never changed the history of the world. I will not refer to the remote past, though an accident has made the most memorable instance of antiquity at this moment fresh in the minds and memory of all around me. But even the costly sacrifice of a Caesar did not propitiate the inexorable destiny of his country.

“Nationality is the principle of political independence. Race is the principle of physical analogy,”

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1848/aug/09/supply-navy-estimates in the House of Commons (9 August 1848).
1840s
Context: The hon. Gentleman has said, in a most extraordinary manner, that our security for peace at the present day is the desire of nations to keep at home. There is a great difference between nationality and race. Nationality is the principle of political independence. Race is the principle of physical analogy, and you have at this moment the principle of race— not at all of nationality— adopted by Germany, the very country to which the hon. Member for the West Riding referred.

“Religious education is demanded by the nation generally and by the instincts of human nature.”

Source: Speech to the Conservatives of Manchester (3 April 1872), quoted in Selected Speeches of the Late Right Honourable the Earl of Beaconsfield, Volume II, ed. T. E. Kebbel (1882), p. 505