Robert Menzies Quotations

It is a simple but sometimes forgotten truth that the greatest enemy to present joy and high hopes is the cultivation of retrospective bitterness.

Never forget posterity when devising a policy. Never think of posterity when making a speech.

A man may be a tough, concentrated, successful money-maker and never contribute to his country anything more than a horrible example.

The long-established and noble rule of Law, one of the greatest products of the character and tradition of British history, has suffered a deadly blow. Blackmail has become respectable.

Considering the company I keep in this place, that is hardly surprising.

I am one of the few men honest enough to say they do not understand women.

Men of genius are not to be analyzed by commonplace rules. The rest of us who have been or are leaders, more commonplace in our quality, will do well to remember two things. One is never to forget posterity when devising a policy. The other is never to think of posterity when making a speech.

There is something about being the subject of the Queen which distinguishes you in a material way from other people

You don't have a democracy. It's a photocracy.

I pay my taxes," says somebody, as if that were an act of virtue instead of one of compulsion.

Men of genius are not to be analysed by commonplace rules. The rest of us who have been or are leaders, more commonplace in our quality, will do well to remember two things. One is never to forget posterity when devising a policy. The other is never to think of posterity when making a speech.

"I pay my taxes," says somebody, as if that were an act of virtue instead of one of compulsion.

In all my life I have treated the press with marked contempt and remarkable success.

Experiment is necessary in establishing an academy, but certain principles must apply to this business of art as to any other business which affects the artistic tic sense of the community. Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.

Two days in this city is worth two months in New York.

Never take any notice of Anonymous letters, unless you get a few thousand on the same subject.

A manager may be tough and practical, squeezing out, while the going is good, the last ounce of profit and dividend . . .

When people meet my wife they think better of me. They say: "With a wife like that, he can't be as bad as we thought".

One thing about bureaucrats is that they never swallow their young. Leave them alone and you'll find them increasing every year.

What Great Britain calls the Far East is to us the near north.

One speaks with great respect of economists, if only because they represent such a variety of opinions.

My headmaster chastised me with a diabolical instrument a leather strap tacked to a piece of wood but he taught me with such villainous success that I am now Prime Minister.

A man may be a tough, concentrated, successful moneymaker and never contribute to his country anything more than a horrible example. A manager may be tough and practical, squeezing out, while the going is good, the last ounce of profit and dividend, and may leave behind him an exhausted industry and a legacy of industrial hatred. A tough manager may never look outside his own factory walls or be conscious of his partnership in a wider world. I often wonder what strange cud such men sit chewing when their working days are over, and the accumulating riches of the mind have eluded them.

The kind of people I myself represent in parliament; salary earners, shopkeepers, skilled artisans, professional men and women, farmers and so on, these are, in a political and economic sense, the middle class. They are for the most part unorganised and unselfconscious.

Modern history is, as you all know, full of examples of great movements that disappeared because they had ceased to have any genuine reason for existence. The important thing is to have a faith to live by, and that goes for us in this party.

I did but see her passing by and yet I love her till I die.

The great vice of democracy is that for a generation we have been busy getting ourselves on to the list of beneficiaries and removing ourselves from the list of contributors, as if somewhere there was somebody else's effort on which we could thrive.

Thinking ahead, what really happens to us will depend on how many people we have who are of the great and sober and dynamic middle-class - the strivers, the planners, the ambitious ones.

More good things in life are lost by indifference than ever were lost by active hostility.

We took the name 'Liberal' because we were determined to be a progressive party, willing to make experiments, in no sense reactionary but believing in the individual, his rights, and his enterprise, and rejecting the socialist panacea.