Stanley Baldwin: Quotes about thinking

“I think that our experience in business had taught us that, as a matter of fact, there are no such things as supermen, and that we should have to rely on the innate common-sense, integrity, courage and faith of the common men and women of this country if we were to make good.”

Stanley Baldwin

Speech in Leeds (13 March 1925), quoted in On England, and Other Addresses (1926), p. 62.
1925
Context: We were not peculiarly impressed with speeches that talked of the glorious time that was coming after the war. We realised what the war meant in the world. We felt the foundations of civilisation in Europe cracking. We knew as business men that for a generation this country and the world would be as a whole far, far poorer, and we realised early the struggle that must result to repair the cracks in the foundations of our civilisation and to restore to the country that level of prosperity which she had enjoyed before the war. I think, too, many of us had little faith in supermen. I think that our experience in business had taught us that, as a matter of fact, there are no such things as supermen, and that we should have to rely on the innate common-sense, integrity, courage and faith of the common men and women of this country if we were to make good.

Women , Men , Faith , Courage

“To-day when we think of Empire we think of it primarily as an instrument of world peace.”

Stanley Baldwin

Speech to a dinner given by the Province of Ontario (6 August 1927), quoted in Our Inheritance (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1938), pp. 91-92.
1927
Context: There is no precedent for the British Commonwealth of Nations... we have wrought for ourselves a common tradition which transcends all local loyalties and binds us as one people. The Empire of our dreams, if not always of our deeds, is compacted of great spiritual elements— freedom and law, fellowship and loyalty, honour and toleration... To-day when we think of Empire we think of it primarily as an instrument of world peace.

World , Peace , Thinking

“Supposing I had gone to the country and said that Germany was rearming and that we must rearm, 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.”

Stanley Baldwin

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1936/nov/12/debate-on-the-address in the House of Commons (12 November 1936).
1936
Context: I put before the whole House my own views with an appalling frankness. From 1933, I and my friends were all very worried about what was happening in Europe. You will remember at that time the Disarmament Conference was sitting in Geneva. You will remember at that time there was probably a stronger pacifist feeling running through this country than at any time since the War. I am speaking of 1933 and 1934... My position as the leader of a great party was not altogether a comfortable one. I asked myself what chance was there... within the next year or two of that feeling being so changed that the country would give a mandate for rearmament? Supposing I had gone to the country and said that Germany was rearming and that we must rearm, 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. I think the country itself learned by certain events that took place during the winter of 1934–35 what the perils might be to it. All I did was to take a moment perhaps less unfortunate than another might have been, and we won the election with a large majority... [In 1935] we got from the country—with a large majority—a mandate for doing a thing that no one, 12 months before, would have believed possible.

Democracy , Thinking , Loss , Cry

“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

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1934/jul/30/armaments in the House of Commons (30 July 1934).
1934
Context: 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.

Thinking

“I am sure that none among us can think upon this Commonwealth of British nations, which men and women of our own race have created, without a stirring of our deepest feelings.”

Stanley Baldwin

Empire Day message (1925), quoted in On England, and Other Addresses (1926), pp. 213-214.
1925
Context: Our Empire grew from the adventurous spirit of our fathers. They went forth, urged by the love of adventure, by the passion for discovery, by the desire for a freer life in new countries. Wherever they went, they carried with them the traditions, the habits, the ideals of their Mother Country. Wherever they settled they planted a new homeland. And though mountains and the waste of seas divided them, they never lost that golden thread of the spirit which drew their thoughts back to the land of their birth. Even their children, and their children's children, to whom Great Britain was no more than a name, a vision, spoke of it always as Home. In this sense of kinship the Empire finds its brightest glory and its most essential strength. The Empires of old were created by military conquest and sustained by military domination. They were Empires of subject races governed by a central power. Our Empire is so different from these that we must give the word Empire a new meaning, or use instead of it the title Commonwealth of British Nations... I am sure that none among us can think upon this Commonwealth of British nations, which men and women of our own race have created, without a stirring of our deepest feelings.

Women , Men , Feeling , Thinking

“I think that to those of us who have watched the development of the Middle West and the Far West nothing is more remarkable, nothing pays a higher tribute to the finest qualities of our race, than the way in which law and order are maintained from coast to coast.”

Stanley Baldwin

Speech in Regina, Canada (13 August 1927), quoted in Our Inheritance (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1938), p. 105.
1927

Law , Way , Thinking

“I do not think there is any single thing more important for our people, and for those who form public opinion, than to keep our people immune, so far as they can be so kept, from the virus of either Communism or Fascism. Our constitution has been evolved… There are some people who speak wildly and loosely about sudden and fundamental changes. Look out for them, and remember that our party, full of ideas of progress to-day as any other party that exists, has always stood, in Disraeli's words, "for the maintenance of the Constitution."… any attempt at sudden constitutional changes of a fundamental nature would not be maintaining the Constitution… the whole virtue of our people… has been the way in which we have adapted ourselves, and adapted the instruments that we use to give effect to our wishes; and we have adapted ourselves without bloodshed and without hatred among ourselves. Far, far the most important thing that we have to do is to keep this country at least… secure from those strange crises that to-day are rushing round the world.”

Stanley Baldwin

Speech to the Bewdley Unionist Association in Worcester (10 April 1937), quoted in Service of Our Lives (1937), pp. 102-104.
1937

People , World , Way , Communication

“What matters is that religion should sway our motives, sustain our principles, surround and bathe our spirits like a secret atmosphere as we go about our work…Religion, as we are all agreed, is not merely an affair of Christians in churches; it is an affair of Christians in politics, in diplomacy, in trade, in industry, in school, in sport. I think the popular judgment has accepted that as axiomatic.”

Stanley Baldwin

Speech to the annual assembly of the Congregational Union, London (12 May 1931), published in This Torch of Freedom (1935), pp. 80-81.
1931

Secret , School , Religion , Motivation

“For Greek democracy failed, and the reasons for its failure are full of instruction. The great ruling ideas which the Greeks gave to the world, ideas which England later was to absorb and spread over a quarter of the globe, freedom and self-government, social equality and civic patriotism, these were corrupted by demagogues and flatterers of the people. It was so fatally easy to think that freedom meant doing what you like, that one man was not only as good as another but equally able to fill any office whatsoever, that majorities could do no wrong, that you could make Utopian laws for your own country without regard to what other nations or other empires were doing…Freedom of speech was stifled and public men who refused to advocate pleasures for the public multitude were banished. Politicians rivalled one another in bribing the electorate.”

Stanley Baldwin

The John Clifford Lecture at Coventry (14 July 1930), published in This Torch of Freedom (1935), pp. 35-36.
1930

Men , People , Pleasure , World

“Then, above all, the English people have a curious sense of humour, rather than wit. Humour comes from the heart; wit comes from the brain. We can laugh at ourselves. Do you remember what Ruskin said? "The English laugh is the purest and truest in the metals that can be minted," and indeed, only Heaven can know what the country owes to it. Well, laughter is one of the best things that God has given us, and with hearty laughter neither malice nor indecency can exist. And of all men who have shown us what that laughter can mean, none was like Dickens, every one of whose characters is English to the marrow; and if I might mention a living writer, I think the truest Englishmen are found in Mr. Priestley's novels.”

Stanley Baldwin

Broadcast from London (25 September 1933), quoted in This Torch of Freedom (1935), p. 13.
1933

Men , God , People , Thinking

“Why is it, one is apt to ask on an occasion like this, that people come forward to make these gifts, and why should it be necessary to preserve spots like this? I think it answers to a very deep and profound instinct of the English people. We have become largely an urban folk, but there lies, deep down in the hearts of even of those who have toiled in our cities for two or three generations, an ineradicable love of country things and country beauty, as it may exist in them traditionally and subconsciously; and to them, as much as and even more than to ourselves, the country represents the eternal values and the eternal traditions from which we must never allow ourselves to be separated.”

Stanley Baldwin

Speech at the handing over ceremony of Haresfield Beacon to the National Trust (10 January 1931), published in This Torch of Freedom (1935), p. 120.
1931

Love , People , Beauty , Thinking

“When we speak of Empire, it is in no spirit of flag-wagging…we feel that in this great inheritance of ours, separated as it is by the seas, we have yet one home and one people…great as the material benefits are, we do not look primarily to them. I think deep down in all our hearts we look to the Empire as the means by which we may hope to see that increase of our race which we believe to be of such inestimable benefit to the world at large; the spread abroad of people to whom freedom and justice are as the breath of their nostrils, of people distinguished, as we would fain hope and believe, above all things, by an abiding sense of duty. If ever the day should come when an appeal to that sense of duty falls on deaf ears among our own kin, that day indeed would be the end of our country and of our Empire, to which you and I have dedicated our very lives.”

Stanley Baldwin

Speech at the Albert Hall (4 December 1924), quoted in On England, and Other Addresses (1926), pp. 71-72.
1924

People , World , Justice , Hope

“As we study [the British Empire's] destiny, we are bound to think of it less as a human achievement than as an instrument of Divine Providence for the promotion of the progress of mankind.”

Stanley Baldwin

Speech in Hyde Park (24 May 1929), published in This Torch of Freedom (1935), p. 26.
1929

Thinking , Study

“With two lunatics like Mussolini and Hitler you can never be sure of anything. But I am determined to keep the country out of war. …[Hankey] thinks sanctions were put in [the Covenant of the League of Nations] at the request of the Americans. Likely enough, as they would be the first to run away from enforcing them. You will not get our people for a long time yet to be willing to pledge themselves to go to war for objects in the east of Europe.”

Stanley Baldwin

Conversation with Thomas Jones (30 April 1936), quoted in Thomas Jones, A Diary with Letters. 1931-1950 (Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 191.
1936

War , People , Thinking , Time

“The 1922 Club gave me a dinner in the House the other night and I think I had a great success…I had just a note or two to keep me right. I said there were some who doubted whether I was a dyed-in-the-wool Tory. I told them I wore Tory colours in my pram in the 1868 election. My father voted Whig then, but our cook was a Tory and she saw to my politics. For 94 years a Tory had represented Bewdley. I told them of my fight at Kidderminster, how I had come back from a visit to the United States a protectionist, how we were stirred by Joseph Chamberlain's tariff campaign, how we blundered badly over the Taff Vale decision. How when the war ended we were in a new world and how class conscious and revolutionary it was; how I felt that our Party was being destroyed and how I determined to do what I could to rescue it. I did not mention L[loyd] G[eorge] or Winston [Churchill]. Then in 1931 we conformed to the King's wish and all my colleagues agreed with me in doing so. I then touched on German rearmament and claimed that we could not have got this country to rearm one moment earlier than we did.”

Stanley Baldwin

Conversation with Thomas Jones (22 May 1936), quoted in Thomas Jones, A Diary with Letters. 1931-1950 (Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 204.
1936

War , World , Thinking , Decision

“I think some of us found that we were getting to cling much more loosely to material wealth, and to realise that wealth was made to be a servant and not a master—that as a servant it had a most useful function to perform, that as a master it meant damnation.”

Stanley Baldwin

Speech in Leeds (13 March 1925), quoted in On England, and Other Addresses (1926), pp. 61-62.
1925

Thinking , Wealth

“What about my Soul? That's all right. The essence of such service is unselfishness. My first thought has to be of others, of the relationship of Crown and people: there will be no room to think of money or of my own career.”

Stanley Baldwin

Letter to J. C. C. Davidson (28 January 1919) on contemplating acceptance of government office, quoted in Robert Rhodes James (ed.), Memoirs of a Conservative: J. C. C. Davidson's Memoirs and Papers, 1910-1937 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969), p. 95.
1910s

Money , People , Soul , Thinking

“One thing that strikes me when I think of Booth is the nonsense that is talked to-day about the poverty of the Victorian age. Why the Victorian age is so unpopular to-day very largely arises from the fact that, in spite of all its faults, there was among its great men, who were numerous, a faith in goodness: there was a moral earnestness and there was a sense of duty and a performance of duty.”

Stanley Baldwin

Speech to the Salvation Army William Booth Centenary Celebrations, London (10 April 1929), published in This Torch of Freedom (1935), pp. 106-107.
1929

Men , Age , Faith , Thinking

“I think the English people are at heart and in practice the kindest people in the world…there is in England a profound sympathy for the under-dog. There is a brotherly and a neighbourly feeling which we see to a remarkable extent through all classes. There is a way of facing misfortunes with a cheerful face. It was shown to a marvellous degree in the war.”

Stanley Baldwin

Speech at the annual dinner of The Royal Society of St. George (6 May 1924), quoted in On England, and Other Addresses (1926), pp. 4-5.
1924

War , People , World , Dogs

“Better to doubt methodically than to think capriciously.”

Stanley Baldwin

Speech at his inauguration as Lord Rector of The University of Edinburgh (6 November 1925), quoted in On England, and Other Addresses (1926), p. 83.
1925

Thinking