
“Obstinate, tiresome and stupid.”
Curzon's opinion of Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, quoted in Nicholas Mansergh, The Commonwealth Experience (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969), p. 224.
The Other Half: A Self Portrait http://books.google.com/books?id=4gg0AAAAMAAJ&q=%22In+time+of+war+all+countries+behave+equally+badly+because+the+power+of+action+is+handed+over+to+stupid+and+obstinate+men%22&pg=PA4#v=onepage (1977)
“Obstinate, tiresome and stupid.”
Curzon's opinion of Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, quoted in Nicholas Mansergh, The Commonwealth Experience (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969), p. 224.
Panzer Leader (1952), Ch. 13 : Leading Personalities of the Third Reich, p. 432
Les silences du colonel Bramble (The Silence of Colonel Bramble)
1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), Compensation
Context: The league between virtue and nature engages all things to assume a hostile front to vice. The beautiful laws and substances of the world persecute and whip the traitor. He finds that things are arranged for truth and benefit, but there is no den in the wide world to hide a rogue. Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass. Commit a crime, and it seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as reveals in the woods the track of every partridge and fox and squirrel and mole. You cannot recall the spoken word, you cannot wipe out the foot-track, you cannot draw up the ladder, so as to leave no inlet or clew. Some damning circumstance always transpires. The laws and substances of nature — water, snow, wind, gravitation — become penalties to the thief.
On the other hand, the law holds with equal sureness for all right action. Love, and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just, as much as the two sides of an algebraic equation. The good man has absolute good, which like fire turns every thing to its own nature, so that you cannot do him any harm; but as the royal armies sent against Napoleon, when he approached, cast down their colors and from enemies became friends, so disasters of all kinds, as sickness, offence, poverty, prove benefactors:
“When we speak of power, we mean man's control over the minds and actions of other men.”
Source: Politics Among Nations (1948), p. 33 (1993 edition).
Context: When we speak of power, we mean man's control over the minds and actions of other men. By political power we refer to the mutual relations of control among the holders of public authority and between the latter and the people at large.
“Premenstrual Syndrome: Just before their periods women behave the way men do all the time.”
credited to Lowell Stone, M.D., born 2144; chapter 15, p. 185
The Cat Who Walks Through Walls (1985)
“The obstacle has been Mackenzie King, the Canadian, who is both obstinate, tiresome and stupid.”
Source: Letter to his wife during the 1923 Imperial Conference (8 November 1923), quoted in Terry Reardon, Winston Churchill and Mackenzie King: So Similar, So Different (2012), pp. 52-53