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Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury: 224 quotes1 like

“[Permitting discussions in the Indian Council seems to me] an unmeaning mimicry of the forms of popular institutions where the reality is impossible. What is called public opinion in India is frequently the opinion of a clique, and presents none of the guarantees for sound judgment possessed by a public opinion which represents the combined views of a large mass of different interests and classes. I have the smallest possible belief in 'Councils' possessing any other than consultative functions.”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury

Source: Letter to Lord Northbrook (12 June 1874), quoted in S. Gopal, British Policy in India, 1858-1905 (Cambridge University Press, 1965), p. 104.

“So long as we have government by party, the very notion of repose must be foreign to English politics. Agitation is, so to speak, endowed in this country. There is a standing machinery for producing it. There are rewards which can only be obtained by men who excite the public mind, and devise means of persuading one set of persons that they are deeply injured by another. The production of cries is encouraged by a heavy bounty. The invention and exasperation of controversies lead those who are successful in such arts to place, and honour, and power. Therefore, politicians will always select the most irritating cries, and will raise the most exasperating controversies the circumstances will permit.”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury

Quarterly Review, 131, 1873, p. 578
1870s

“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

Source: Speech at Newcastle-upon-Tyne (11 October 1881), from The Times (12 October 1881), p. 7

“…institutions like the House of Lords must die, like all other organic beings, when their time comes.”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury

Letter to Alfred Austin (29 April 1888), from Paul Smith (ed.), Lord Salisbury on politics: a selection from his articles in the Quarterly Review, 1860–83 (1972), p. 39, footnote
1880s

“If England is to remain supreme, she must be able to appeal to the coloured against the white, as well to the white against the coloured. It is therefore not merely as a matter of sentiment and of justice, but as a matter of safety, that we ought to try and lay the foundation of some feeling on the part of coloured races towards the crown other than the recollection of defeat and the sensation of subjection.”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury

Source: Letter to the Viceroy of India Lord Lytton (7 July 1876), quoted in S. Gopal, British Policy in India, 1858-1905 (Cambridge University Press, 1965), p. 115

“…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

Saturday Review, 17, 1864, pp. 129–30
1860s

“…as individuals and as nations we live in states of society utterly different from each other. As a collection of individuals, we live under the highest and latest development of civilization, in which the individual is rigidly forbidden to defend himself, because society is always ready and able to defend him. As a collection of nations we live in an age of the merest Faustrecht, in which each one obtains his rights precisely in proportion to his ability, or that of his allies, to fight for them…In practice it is found that International Law is always on the side of strong battalions…It is puerile…to apply to the dealings of a nation with its neighbour's territory the morality which would be applicable to two individuals possessing adjoining property, and protected from mutual wrong by a law superior to both.”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury

Quarterly Review, 151, 1881, pp. 542-544
1880s

“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

Letter to Sir Henry Peek http://wist.info/salisbury-lord/5899/ (1888) <br class="br">1880s

“…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

Salisbury to the Cabinet (8 March 1878), from John Vincent (ed.), The Diaries of Edward Henry Stanley, Fifteenth Earl of Derby (London: The Royal Historical Society, 1994), p. 523
1870s

“In the supreme struggle of social order against anarchy, we cannot deny to the champions of civilised society the moral latitude which is by common consent accorded to armed men fighting for their country against a foreign foe.”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury

On Lord Castlereagh's use of bribery to pass the Irish Act of Union. Quarterly Review, 111, 1862, p. 204
1860s

“I have for so many years entertained a firm conviction that we were going to the dogs that I have got to be quite accustomed to the expectation.”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury

Source: Letter to H. W. Acland (4 February 1867), from G. Cecil, The Life of Robert, Marquis of Salisbury. Volume I, p. 211

“Mr. Parnell said the other night, that Ireland is a "nation". Well, if a nation only means a certain number of individuals collected between certain latitudes and longitudes, I admit in that sense Ireland is a nation. But if there is anything further necessary— if to make a nation you require a past united history, traditions in which you can all join, achievements of which you all are proud, interests which you share in common, and sympathies which belong to all— then emphatically Ireland is not a nation; Ireland is two nations.”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury

Source: Speech to the National Union of Conservative and Constitutional Associations in St. James's Hall, London (15 May 1886), quoted in The Times (17 May 1886), p. 6

“…that shapeless, formless, fibreless mass of platitudes which in official cant is called "unsectarian religion."”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury

Quarterly Review, 113, 1863, p. 266
1860s

“The struggle for power in our day lies not between Crown and people, or between a caste of nobles and a bourgeoisie, but between the classes who have property and the classes who have none.”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury

Quarterly Review, 112, 1862, p. 542
1860s

“I would have devoted my whole efforts to securing the waterway to India – by the acquisition of Egypt or of Crete, and would in no way have discouraged the obliteration of Turkey.”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury

Source: Letter to Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton (15 June 1877), from G. Cecil, The Life of Robert, Marquis of Salisbury. Volume II, pp. 145-146

“The business which brings you here to-day is of a peculiar character, due to the very peculiar character of the Empire over which the Queen rules. It yields to none, it is perhaps superior to all in its greatness, in its extent, in the vastness of its population, in the magnificence of its wealth. But it has this peculiarity which separates it from other empires—the want of continuity. The Empire is separated into parts, and distant parts, by large stretches of ocean, and what we are really here to do is to see how far we must acquiesce in the conditions which that separation causes, how far we can obliterate them by agreement and by organization.”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury

Source: Speech to the Colonial Conference, London (4 April 1887), quoted in The Times (5 April 1887), p. 11

“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

Source: 'Parliamentary Reform', Quarterly Review, 117, 1865, p. 550

“The two parties represent two opposite moods of the English mind, which may be trusted, unless past experience is wholly useless, to succeed each other from time to time. Neither of them, neither the love of organic changes nor the dislike of it, can be described as normal to a nation. In every nation, they have succeeded each other at varying intervals during the whole of the period which separates its birth from its decay. Each finds in the circumstances and constitution of individuals a regular support which never deserts it. Among men, the old, the phlegmatic, the sober-minded, among classes, those who have more to lose than to gain by change, furnish the natural Conservatives. The young, the envious, the restless, the dreaming, those whose condition cannot easily be made worse, will be rerum novarum cupidi.”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury

But the two camps together will not nearly include the nation: for the vast mass of every nation is unpolitical.
Quarterly Review, 133, 1872, pp. 583-584
1870s

“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

Speech at Edinburgh (24 November 1882), from in G. Cecil, The Life of Robert, Marquis of Salisbury. Volume III, p. 65
1880s