
Speech in South Africa (20 May 1991) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/108268
Post-Prime Ministerial
Third State of the Union Address (7 December 1903)
1900s
Speech in South Africa (20 May 1991) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/108268
Post-Prime Ministerial
Speech in the House of Commons against the Trade Disputes Bill (30 March 1906), as published in The Speeches of Lord Birkenhead (1929), pp. 15-22.
Context: We are asked to permit a hundred men to go round to the house of a man who wishes to exercise the common law right in this country to sell his labour where and when he chooses, and to 'advise' him or 'peacefully persuade' him not to work. If peaceful persuasion is the real object, why are a hundred men required to do it? … Every honest man knows why trade unions insist on the right to a strong numerical picket. It is because they rely for their objects neither on peacefulness nor persuasion. Those whom they picket cannot be peacefully persuaded. They understand with great precision their own objects, and their own interests, and they are not in the least likely to be persuaded by the representatives of trade unions, with different objects and different interests. But, though arguments may never persuade them, numbers may easily intimidate them. And it is just because argument has failed, and intimidation has succeeded, that the Labour Party insists upon its right to picket unlimited in respect of numbers.
“A man with a club [bat] is a law-maker, a man to be obeyed, but not necessarily conciliated.”
Source: The Call of the Wild
1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero As King
“To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.”
Address to the Tenth National Women's Rights Convention on Marriage and Divorce, New York City, May 11, 1860; as published in Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Feminist as Thinker: A Reader in Documents and Essays edited by Ellen Carol DuBois and Richard Cándida Smith.
Sestina of the Space Rocket (1953)
Context: Yes, we hope to seed a new, rich earth.
We hope to breed a race of men whose power
Dwells in hearts as open as all Space
Itself, who ask for nothing but the light
That rinses the heart of hate so that the stars
Above will be below when man has Love.
As quoted in Time (17 February 1958)