Stanley Baldwin citations (225 citations, Page 7)

“I always maintain that the great service that education renders to democracy is the same service that we hope to gain from religion. They work, or ought to work, hand in hand. It is to keep the moral weights and measures true to standard; and not only true to standard—true to the highest standard. And let us have that applied impartially to all classes of the community from the top to the bottom. There are those who would empty the conception of the state of all moral qualities, and they would confine education to a bread-and-butter business. If I may paraphrase Nurse Cavell's dying words, such patriotism is not enough. Moral standards, applied as I suggest, are the surest way to achieve that fundamental social unity which is postulated by democracy.”

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Stanley Baldwin

Speech to the Canadian Club in Toronto (6 August 1927), quoted in Our Inheritance (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1938), pp. 79-80.
1927

“…one day there came a great strike in the coalfields. It was one of the earlier strikes, and it became a national strike. We tried to carry on as long as we could, but of course it became more and more difficult to carry on, and gradually furnace after furnace was damped down; the chimneys erased to smoke, and about 1,000 men who had no interest in the dispute that was going on were thrown out of work through no fault of their own, at a time when there was no unemployment benefit. I confess that that event set me thinking very hard. It seemed to me at that time a monstrous injustice to these men, because I looked upon them as my own family, and it hit me very hard—I would not have mentioned this only it got into the Press two or three years ago—and I made an allowance to them, not a large one, but something, for six weeks to carry them along, because I felt that they were being so unfairly treated. But there was more in it really than that. There was no conscious unfair treatment, of these men by the miners. It simply was that we were gradually passing into a new state of industry, when the small firms and the small industries were being squeezed out. Business was all tending towards great amalgamations on the one side of employers and on the other side of the men…We have to see what wise statesmanship can do to steer the country through this time of evolution, until we can get to the next stage of our industrial civilisation.”

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Stanley Baldwin

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1925/mar/06/industrial-peace in the House of Commons (6 March 1925).
1925

“Sir Walter Scott, Wordsworth, Byron…Carlyle, Tennyson, John Henry Newman…Thackeray, Browning and Dickens. There was a galaxy of talent of the highest order in a literature that stands second to none in the world…No country can compare with our own in the literature of that period…I have always firmly held that there is no race with more ability latent than our own, or with a higher aptitude for mechanical genius. When the College was founded, Hargreaves, Arkwright and Crompton, all sons of working men, were inventing the machines which brought the cotton industry. I mention these names to show the stuff of which our people are made, and how that stuff is worth training and educating. It would be a very interesting subject, for anyone who cared to explore it, to see how many of the mechanical inventions which are light-heartedly attributed to Americans are really the product of British brains, whether they were British brains which have gone to work in that country, or the brains of children of British parents who have gone there.”

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Stanley Baldwin

Speech at Birkbeck College (20 March 1924), quoted in On England, and Other Addresses (1926), pp. 143-144.
1924

“I get an obsession that everybody is out for what they can get during the war and it makes me sick.”

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Stanley Baldwin

Letter to Lady Dickinson (28 November 1917), 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. 79.
1910s

“Yes, it was a success. I know it. It was almost wholly unprepared. I had a success, my dear Nicolson, at the moment I most needed it. Now is the time to go.”

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Stanley Baldwin

Harold Nicolson's diary entry (10 December 1936) recording Baldwin's comments after listening to Baldwin's speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1936/dec/10/members-of-the-house-of-commons on the Abdication of Edward VIII. Quoted in Nigel Nicolson (ed.), Harold Nicolson: Diaries and Letters. 1930-1939 (London: Collins, 1966), p. 286.
1936

“Tom Mosley is a cad and a wrong 'un and they will find it out.”

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Stanley Baldwin

Stanley Baldwin (21 June 1929), quoted in Thomas Jones, Whitehall Diary: Volume II (1969), p. 195. "They" were the Labour Party which had recently won the general election.
1929

“Civilisation may perish as the result of war: it would certainly perish as the result of Nazi-ism triumphant beyond the borders of the country of its birth… And now we know that should the challenge come, we shall be there. In Luther's words “we can no other.” We were there when the Spanish galleons made for Plymouth: we were on those bloody fields in the Netherlands when Louis XIV aimed at the domination of Europe: we were on duty when Napoleon bestrode the world like a demi-god, and we answered the roll call, as you did, in August, 1914. We can no other. So help us, God.”

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Stanley Baldwin

Speech to the University of Toronto (April 1939), quoted in An Interpreter of England. The Falconer Lectures (1939), pp. 117-118.
1939

“Difficult as the course is, the dangers do not come from the difficulties; they come from extremists in India and at home. I will tell you what I mean. I am firmly convinced that such writings as appear in such papers as the Daily Mail will do more to lose India for the British Empire, will do more to cause a revolutionary spirit, than anything that can be done in any way by anyone else. I got many letters, I need hardly say, of all points of view. I had a very characteristic one last week… It was from a colonel; he was an old man, you could tell that by his writing; and he used this phrase: He said, "You and Lord Irwin are negrophiles." Perhaps he was a member of the United Empire party. That is not the way to cement the Empire. This sort of thing, and the spirit behind it, will break up our Empire infallibly, and that is what I am out to fight.”

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Stanley Baldwin

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1931/mar/12/india in the House of Commons (12 March 1931).
1931

“The rhetoric of to-day, the rhetoric we have to consider, is the rhetoric of the "Bulging corn bins." I suppose that this gift has been responsible for more bloodshed on this earth than all the guns and explosives that have ever been invented. If we look back only over the last century, was there anything more responsible for the French Revolution than the literary rhetoric of Rousseau, fanned by the verbal rhetoric of Robespierre and others, just as the Russian Revolution was due to the rhetoric of Kerensky— flatulent rhetoric which filled the bellies of his people with the east wind? That appalling twopenny-ha'penny gift of fluency, with the addition of a certain amount of training and of imagination in word-spinning, is the kind of rhetoric which stirs the emotions of the ignorant mob and sets it moving. It is because such forces can be set in motion by rhetoric that I have no regard for it, but a positive horror.”

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Stanley Baldwin

Speech at the Cambridge Union (March 1924), quoted in On England, and Other Addresses (1926), pp. 95-96.
1924

“Dogmatism is the prerogative of youth.”

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Stanley Baldwin

Speech to the Empire Rally of Youth at the Royal Albert Hall (18 May 1937), quoted in Service of Our Lives (1937), p. 161.
1937

“I was anxious two years ago as to the line which our party would take on the Indian question. I believed that the one course was the only one for a progressive party—and a party must be progressive to live. I believed that the other course led to the destruction of the party.”

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Stanley Baldwin

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1931/dec/03/indian-policy in the House of Commons (3 December 1931).
1931

“There is nowhere in the world, I believe, a higher standard of commercial honour than that which prevails in this country. And the same is true of our Courts of Law, which enjoy a world-wide prestige.”

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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. 84.
1925

“Why did the [Roman] Empire come into existence at all, and why, having come into existence, did it perish?… Surely the character of the Roman played as great a part in the rise of the Empire as his character played in the fall?… to me the outstanding and peculiar strength of the Roman character lies in the words pietas and gravitas. These were the foundations of a patriotism which alone could carry the burden of Empire, a patriotism innate, a motive force of incalculable power, yet something at its best so holy that it was never paraded, sought no reward, was taken for granted, and had no single word to express it.”

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Stanley Baldwin

Speech to the Classical Association (8 January 1926), quoted in On England, and Other Addresses (1926), pp. 103-104.
1926

“I owe a great deal of my public and private life to my Nonconformist ancestry.”

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Stanley Baldwin

Speech to the Nonconformist Unionist League (8 April 1924), quoted in On England, and Other Addresses (1926), p. 269.
1924

“The Englishman is all right as long as he is content to be what God made him, an Englishman, but gets into trouble when he tries to be something else. There are chroniclers, or were chroniclers, who said it was the apeing of the French manners by our English ancestors that made us the prey of William the Norman, and led to our defeat at Hastings. Let that be a warning to us not to ape any foreign country. Let us be content to trust ourselves and to be ourselves.”

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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), p. 2.
1924

“It is no ready made article; it has grown through the centuries as native to our country and people as the oak, ash, or thorn. It has given her people freedom and taught them the difference between freedom and licence. That is the Constitution that is threatened to-day, not quite openly yet, by the Socialist Party in their conference, tendenciously by sketching a course of action which if it takes place means the destruction of the Constitution. You may dispute that as much as you like, but in effect taking away the executive power of the House of Commons is the way every tyranny starts. It is proletarian Hitlerism and nothing else, and it can be nothing else. I want you to realize it in time.”

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Stanley Baldwin

Speech in Birmingham (6 October 1933), quoted in The Times (7 October 1933), p. 14.
1933

“My tongue, not my pen, is my instrument.”

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Stanley Baldwin

Conversation with Thomas Jones (7 January 1946), quoted in Thomas Jones, A Diary with Letters. 1931-1950 (Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 540.
1940s

“Now, surely, when we want to educate ourselves for the purpose of citizenship…If you can clear the mind of cant and detect the fallacy, whatever guise it may be wearing, I think you have made a long step forward in the education that every citizen in a democracy that may hope to endure must have. I think that we all of us realise to-day that no civilised community is bound necessarily and by an inscrutable fate to progress, and there are such things in civilisation as checks, that there is such a thing as retrogression, and that the mere existence of a civilised community is no guarantee either for its continuance or for its progress— in other words, that unless we are the faithful guardians of such civilisation as we have already attained to, we run the risk of seeing the whole of the progress that has been made with such infinite labour up to our own time gradually slipping back and back and back.”

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Stanley Baldwin

Speech at the Philip Scott College (27 September 1923), quoted in On England, and Other Addresses (1926), pp. 150-151.
1923

“If I did not believe that our work was done in the faith and hope that at some day, it may be a million years hence, the Kingdom of God will spread over the whole world, I would have no hope, I could do no work, and I would give my office over this morning to anyone who would take it.”

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Stanley Baldwin

Speech to the British and Foreign Bible Society (2 May 1928); published in This Torch of Freedom (1935), pp. 92 - 93
1928

“The right hon. Gentleman's statement was that Germany has already at this moment a military air force which is approaching equality with our own, and that by this time next year, if Germany continues to execute her programme without acceleration and if we continue to carry out the increase announced to Parliament in July last, the German military air force will be at least as strong as, and may be stronger than, our own…It is not the case that Germany is rapidly approaching equality with us…Even if we confine the comparison to the German air strength and the strength of the Royal Air Force immediately available in Europe, Germany is actively engaged in the production of service aircraft, but her real strength is not 50 per cent. of our strength in Europe to-day. As for the position this time next year, if she continues to execute her air programme without acceleration and if we continue to carry out at the present approved rate the expansion announced to Parliament in July…so far from the German military air force being at least as strong as and probably stronger than our own, we estimate that we shall still have in Europe a margin—in Europe alone—of nearly 50 per cent.”

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Stanley Baldwin

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1934/nov/28/debate-on-the-address in the House of Commons (28 November 1934).
1934

“The conception of freedom in our country was one so precious, so hallowed, it has been obtained as the result of such age-long struggles, that I felt convinced that in no other country, whatever advantages in other respects they may have over us—in no other country was freedom treasured and regarded as it was in this country, and in its attainment there was no country in the world that had anything which in all circumstances it could teach us.”

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Stanley Baldwin

Speech to the thirtieth anniversary of the Junior Imperial League in Kingsway Hall (19 June 1926), quoted in Our Inheritance (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1938), p. 19.
1926

“The Englishman is made for a time of crisis, and for a time of emergency. He is serene in difficulties, but may seem to be indifferent when times are easy. He may not look ahead, he may not heed warnings, he may not prepare, but when he once starts he is persistent to the death, and he is ruthless in action. It is these gifts that have made the Englishman what he is, and that have enabled the Englishman to make England and the Empire what it is.”

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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. 3-4.
1924

“All parties are alike implicated in the measures of relief now in force. All are agreed that destitution ought not to be tolerated. But are we all quite happy that in giving John Smith state benefits in this wholesale way we are not at the same time taking away from John Smith something which will make him poor indeed?”

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Stanley Baldwin

The John Clifford Lecture at Coventry (14 July 1930), published in This Torch of Freedom (1935), p. 48.
1930

“The responsibility for progress rests not only on the Government, but on every man and woman in the country. The Government can go no faster in progress than the people will allow them to do. Willing co-operation in new methods is essential, and without the will to work progress is not possible, and with constant stoppages of industry progress is not possible.”

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Stanley Baldwin

Speech at the Albert Hall (4 December 1924), quoted in On England, and Other Addresses (1926), p. 70.
1924

“The time was, when I was a boy, when people hardly dreamed that the day would come when there would be large numbers of Members in this House who could not afford to perform their duties here unless they had an allowance; but I think, looking at the whole Continent of Europe, that, the more the basis of our liberty and our Constitution is broadened, the better for our country. Would anyone who remembers the old days here go back to them and give up what we have gained? This Chamber, the most famous Chamber in democratic government in the world, is now open to all, and, once you admit that everybody has a right to be elected to this House if he can, you cannot logically create or leave a financial bar.”

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Stanley Baldwin

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1937/apr/12/ministers-of-the-crown-bill in the House of Commons (12 April 1937) announcing an increase in MP's salaries.
1937

“I think it is well also for the man in the street to realise that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through.”

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Stanley Baldwin

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1932/nov/10/international-affairs in the House of Commons (10 November 1932).
1932

“Government is carried on in this country more cleanly, I believe, than in any country of the world. It is the rarest thing in our local popular government, as in the government of our country, to find men who fall by the way and yield to temptations that may come from the direction of corruption or undue influence. There is a magnificent tradition handed down from the earliest times in this country, of public service—service for the good of all our brothers in whatever their station of life.”

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Stanley Baldwin

Broadcast from London (6 March 1934); published in This Torch of Freedom (1935), p. 20.
1934

“The die-hard opinions of George III couched in the language of Edmund Burke.”

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Stanley Baldwin

On Winston Churchill's speech against the Government of India Bill (1935) - (Audio file at BBC) http://news.bbc.co.uk/media/audio/38858000/rm/_38858167_churchill1.ram
1935