Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil citations (112 citations, Page 2)

Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil: 112 citations 0 J'aime

Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil: Citations en anglais

“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.”

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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.”

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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."”

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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.”

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Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury

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

“A gram of experience is worth a ton of theory.”

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Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury

Saturday Review (1859)
1850s

“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.”

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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.”

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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.”

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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.”

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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.”

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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

“It is said,—and men seem to think that condemnation can go no further than such a censure—that they brought us within twenty-four hours of revolution…But is it in truth so great an evil, when the dearest interests and the most sincere convictions are at stake, to go within twenty-four hours of revolution?”

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Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury

On resistance to the Reform Act 1832. Quarterly Review, 123, 1867, p. 557
1860s

“Wherever it has had free play in the ancient world or in the modern, in the old hemisphere or the new, a thirst for empire, and a readiness for aggressive war, has always marked it.”

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Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury

On democracy. Quarterly Review, 115, 1864, p. 239
1860s

“Opinions upon moral questions are more often the expression of strongly felt expediency than of careful ethical reasoning; and the opinions so formed by one generation become the conscientious convictions or the sacred instincts of the next.”

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Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury

Saturday Review, 29, 1865, p. 532
1860s

“To give 'the suffrage' to a poor man is to give him as large a part in determining that legislation which is mainly concerned with property as the banker whose name is known on every Exchange in Europe, as the merchant whose ships are in every sea, as the landowner who owns the soil of a whole manufacturing town…two day-labourers shall outvote Baron Rothschild…The bestowal upon any class of a voting power disproportionate to their stake in the country, must infallibly give that class a power pro tanto of using taxation as an instrument of plunder, and expenditure and legislation as a fountain of gain.”

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Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury

Quarterly Review, 116, 1864, p. 266, pp. 269-270
1860s

“It is clear enough that the traditional Palmerstonian policy [of British support for Ottoman territorial integrity] is at an end.”

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Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury

Salisbury to Disraeli (September 1876), from G. Cecil, The Life of Robert, Marquis of Salisbury. Volume II, p. 85
1870s

“Parliament is a potent engine, and its enactments must always do something, but they very seldom do what the originators of these enactments meant.”

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Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury

Statement to the Associated Chambers of Commerce (March 1891)
1890s

“You must remember what the concert of Europe is. The concert, or, as I prefer to call it, the inchoate federation of Europe, is a body which acts only when it is unanimous…remember this—that this federation of Europe is the embryo of the only possible structure of Europe which can save civilization from the desolating effects of a disastrous war. (Cheers.) You notice that on all sides the instruments of destruction, the piling up of arms, are becoming larger and larger. The powers of concentration are becoming greater, the instruments of death more active and more numerous, and are improved with every year; and each nation is bound, for its own safety's sake, to take part in this competition. These are the things which are done, so to speak, on the side of war. The one hope that we have to prevent this competition from ending in a terrible effort of mutual destruction which will be fatal to Christian civilization—the one hope we have is that the Powers may gradually be brought together, to act together in a friendly spirit on all questions of difference which may arise, until at last they shall be welded in some international constitution which shall give to the world, as a result of their great strength, a long spell of unfettered and prosperous trade and continued peace.”

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Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury

Speech at the Guildhall (9 November 1897), quoted in The Times (10 November 1897), p. 6
1890s

“…the splitting up of mankind into a multitude of infinitesimal governments, in accordance with their actual differences of dialect or their presumed differences of race, would be to undo the work of civilisation and renounce all the benefits which the slow and painful process of consolidation has procured for mankind…It is the agglomeration and not the comminution of states to which civilisation is constantly tending; it is the fusion and not the isolation of races by which the physical and moral excellence of the species is advanced. There are races, as there are trees, which cannot stand erect by themselves, and which, if their growth is not hindered by artificial constraints, are all the healthier for twining round some robuster stem.”

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Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury

Source: 'English Politics and Parties', Bentley's Quarterly Review, 1, (1859), p. 22

“The perils of change are so great the promise of the most hopeful theories is so often deceptive, that it is frequently the wiser part to uphold the existing state of things, if it can be done, even though, in point of argument, it should be utterly indefensible…Resistance is folly or heroism—a virtue or a vice—in most cases, according to the probabilities there are of its being successful.”

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Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury

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

“The Lieutenant Governor of Bengal was to the fullest extent responsible for not having made any preparation against the famine…The doctrines of political economy had been worshipped as a sort of "fetish" by officials who, because they believed that in the long run supply and demand would square themselves, seemed to have utterly forgotten that human life was short, and that men could not subsist without food beyond a few days. They mechanically left the laws of political economy to work themselves out while hundreds of thousands of human beings were perishing from famine.”

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Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1867/aug/02/motion-for-an-address in the House of Commons (2 August 1867) on the Orissa famine of 1866
1860s

“The revolution of 1832 was, therefore, in its ultimate results, a democratic revolution, though its earlier form was transitional and incomplete. This form was productive of great advantages for the time: indeed, for some years it might be said, without exaggeration, that the accidental equilibrium of political forces which it had produced presented the highest ideal of internal government the world had hitherto seen. But it was not the less provisional on that account. The forces by which political organisms are destroyed were, for the time, balanced by influences which still lingered, and were, therefore, neutralised. But these were increasing, and the others were decaying, and the balance could not last for any length of time. It has now been finally upset, and we have now fully reached the phase of political transformation to which the revolution of 1832 logically led.”

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Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury

Quarterly Review, 130, 1871, pp. 279-280
1870s

“Half a century ago, the first feeling of all Englishmen was for England. Now, the sympathies of a powerful party are instinctively given to whatever is against England. It may be Boers or Baboos, or Russians or Affghans, or only French speculators – the treatment these all receive in their controversies with England is the same: whatever else my fail them, they can always count on the sympathies of the political a party from whom during the last half century the rulers of England have been mainly chosen…It is striking, though by no means a solitary indication of how low, in the present temper of English politics, our sympathy with our own countrymen has fallen. Of course, we shall be told that a conscience of exalted sensibility, which is the special attribute of the Liberal party, has enabled them to discover, what English statesmen had never discovered before, that the cause to which our countrymen are opposed is generally the just one…For ourselves, we are rather disposed to think that patriotism has become in some breasts so very reasonable an emotion, because it is ceasing to be an emotion at all; and that these superior scruples, to which our fathers were insensible, and which always make the balance of justice lean to the side of abandoning either our territory or our countrymen, indicate that the national impulses which used to make Englishmen cling together in face of every external trouble are beginning to disappear.”

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Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury

‘Disintegration’, Quarterly Review, no. 312; October 1883, reprinted in Paul Smith (ed.), Lord Salisbury on Politics. A selection from his articles in the Quaterly Review, 1860-1883 (Cambridge University Press, 1972), pp. 342-343
1880s

“…the vista of an age of security and peace – disbanded armaments, forgotten jealousies, immunity not only from the scourge but from the panic of war; pleasant dreams, constantly belied by experience, constantly renewed by theorists, but too closely linked to the hopes of all who believe either in material progress or in the promises of religion ever to be abandoned as chimera.”

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Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury

Quarterly Review, 107, 1860, p. 516
1860s

“Salisbury said two things which are more decided than any former utterances of his: that Russia at Constantinople would do us no harm: and that we ought to seize Egypt.”

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Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury

Salisbury to the Cabinet (16 June 1877), from John Vincent (ed.), The Diaries of Edward Henry Stanley, Fifteenth Earl of Derby (London: The Royal Historical Society, 1994), p. 410
1870s

“English policy is to float lazily downstream, occasionally putting out a diplomatic boat-hook to avoid collisions.”

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Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury

Letter to Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton (9 March 1877), as quoted in G. Cecil, The Life of Robert, Marquis of Salisbury. Volume II, p. 130
1870s