William E. Gladstone Quotations

Be happy with what you have and are, be generous with both, and you won't have to hunt for happiness.

If you are cold, tea will warm you; if you are too heated, it will cool you; If you are depressed, it will cheer you; If you are excited, it will calm you.

Men are apt to mistake the strength of their feeling for the strength of their argument. The heated mind resents the chill touch and relentless scrutiny of logic.

There should be a sympathy with freedom, a desire to give it scope, founded not upon visionary ideas, but upon the long experience of many generations within the shores of this happy isle, that in freedom you lay the firmest foundations both of loyalty and order.

Remember the rights of the savage, as we call him. Remember that the happiness of his humble home, remember that the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan, among the winter snows, is as inviolable in the eye of Almighty God, as can be your own.

All the world over, I will back the masses against the classes.

Here is my first principle of foreign policy: good government at home.

Selfishness is the greatest curse of the human race.

Liberalism is trust of the people tempered by prudence. Conservatism is distrust of the people tempered by fear.

No man ever became great or good except through many and great mistakes.

We look forward to the time when the Power of Love will replace the Love of Power. Then will our world know the blessings of peace.

It is not a life at all. It is a reticence, in three volumes.

No one ever became great except through many and great mistakes.

Nothing that is morally wrong can be politically right.

The disease of an evil conscience is beyond the practice of all the physicians of all the countries in the would.

Mediocrity is now, as formerly, dangerous, commonly fatal, to the poet; but among even the successful writers of prose, those who rise sensibly above it are the very rarest exceptions.

It is the duty of government to make it difficult for people to do wrong, easy to do right.

You cannot fight against the future. Time is on our side.

We are bound to lose Ireland in consequence of years of cruelty, stupidity and misgovernment and I would rather lose her as a friend than as a foe.

Good laws make it easier to do right and harder to do wrong.

If Germany is to become a colonizing power, all I say is, ''God speed her!'' She becomes our ally and partner in the execution of the great purposes of Providence for the advantage of mankind.

[The British constitution] presumes more boldly than any other the good sense and the good faith of those who work it.

Budgets are not merely affairs of arithmetic, but in a thousand ways go to the root of prosperity of individuals, the relation of classes and the strength of kingdoms.

To be engaged in opposing wrong affords but a slender guarantee for being right.

Man is to be trained chiefly by studying and by knowing man.

You cannot fight against future. Time is on its side.

It is no use for the honorable member to shake his head in the teeth of his own words.

As the British Constitution is the most subtle organism which has proceeded from progressive history, so the American Constitution is the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man.

I venture to say that every man who is not presumably incapacitated by some consideration of personal unfitness or of political danger is morally entitled to come within the pale of the Constitution.

I was tenaciously opposed by the governor and deputy-governor of the Bank, who had seats in parliament, and I had the City for an antagonist on almost every occasion.

All the wonders of the Greek civilization heaped together are less wonderful than the single book of Psalms. Greece had all that this world could give her; but the flowers of Paradise blossomed in Palestine alone.

Censure and criticism never hurt anybody. If false, they can't hurt you unless you are wanting in manly character; and if true, they show a man his weak points, and forewarn him against failure and trouble.

I am certain, from experience, of the immense advantage of strict account-keeping in early life. It is just like learning the grammar then, which when once learned need not be referred to afterwards.

Ireland, Ireland. That cloud in the west, that coming storm.

Economy is the first and great article (economy such as I understand it) in my financial creed. The controversy between direct and indirect taxation holds a minor, though important place.

The oppression of a majority is detestable and odious; the oppression of a minority is only by one degree less detestable and odious.

If Germany is to become a colonizing power, all I say is, God speed her! She becomes our ally and partner in the execution of the great purposes of Providence for the advantage of mankind.

It is difficult to see anything but infatuation in the destructive temperament which leads to the action ... that each of us is to rejoice that our several units are to be distinguished at death into countless millions of organisms; for such, it seems, is the latest revelation delivered from the fragile tripod of a modern Delphi.

To serve Armenia is to serve civilization.

Letter to the committee in charge of the celebration of the centennial of the American Constitution. I have always regarded that Constitution as the most remarkable work known to me in modern times to have been produced by the human intellect, at a single stroke (so to speak), in its application to political affairs.

The American Revolution was a vindication of liberties inherited and possessed. It was a conservative revolution.

Nothing more surely cultivates and embellishes a man than association with refined and virtuous women.

Never forget that the purpose for which a man lives is the improvement of the man himself, so that he may go out of this world having, in his great sphere or his small one, done some little good for his fellow creatures and labored a little to diminish the sin and sorrow that are in the world.

The idea of abolishing Income Tax is to me highly attractive, both on other grounds & because it tends to public economy.

The book must of necessity be put into a bookcase. And the bookcase must be housed. And the house must be kept. And the library must be dusted, must be arranged, must be catalogued. What a vista of toil, yet not unhappy toil!

The hopelessness of the Turkish Government should make me witness with delight its being swept out of the countries which it tortures. Next to the Ottoman Government nothing can be more deplorable and blameworthy than jealousies between Greek and Slav and plans by the States already existing for appropriating other territory. Why not Macedonia for the Macedonians as well as Bulgaria for the Bulgarians and Serbia for the Serbians?

I venture on assuring you that I regard the design formed by you and your friends with sincere interest, and in particular wish well to all the efforts you may make on behalf of individual freedom and independence as opposed to what is termed Collectivism .

A rational reaction against the irrational excesses and vagaries of scepticism may, I admit, readily degenerate into the rival folly of credulity. To be engaged in opposing wrong affords, under the conditions of our mental constitution, but a slender guarantee for being right .

I think that the principle of the Conservative Party is jealousy of liberty and of the people , only qualified by fear ; but I think the principle of the Liberal Party is trust in the people, only qualified by prudence .

Commerce is the equalizer of the wealth of nations.

Swimming for his life, a man does not see much of the country through which the river winds, and I probably know little of these years through which I busily work and live, beyond this, how sin and frailty deface them, and how mercy crowns them.

The resources of civilization are not yet exhausted.

The ravages of drink are greater than those of war pestilence and famine combined.

The errors of former times are recorded for our instruction in order that we may avoid their repition.

For works of the mind really great there is no old age, no decrepitude. It is inconceivable that a time should come when Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, should not ring in the ears of civilized man.

He is the purest figure in history. About George Washington

Decision by majorities is as much an expedient as lighting by gas.

Is not that state a warning and a judgment for our heavy sins as a nation?

Avarice, where it has full dominion, excludes every other passion.

From the time I took office as Chancellor of the Exchequer, I began to learn that the State held, in the face of the Bank and the City, an essentially false position as to finance. The Government itself was not to be a substantive power, but was to leave the Money Power supreme and unquestioned.

I am inclined to say that the personal attendance and intervention of women in election proceedings, even apart from any suspicion of the wider objects of many of the promoters of the present movement, would be a practical evil not only of the gravest, but even of an intolerable character.

Thrift of time will repay you in after-life with a thousandfold of profit beyond your most sanguine dreams.

A rational reaction against irrational excesses and vagaries of skepticism may * * * readily degenerate into the rival folly of credulity.

Be thorough in all you do; and remember that although ignorance often may be innocent, pretension is always despicable.

One example is worth a thousand arguments.

To call a man a characteristically Oxford man is, in my opinion, to give him the highest compliment that could be paid to any human being.

My only hope for the world is in bringing the human mind into contact with divine revelation.

Justice delayed is justice denied.

Be inspired with the belief that life is a great and noble calling; not a mean and groveling thing that we are to shuffle through as we can, but an elevated and lofty destiny.

There is a limit to the work that can be got out of a human body or a human brain, and he is a wise man who wastes no energy on pursuits for which he is not fitted; and he is still wiser who, from among the things that he can do well, chooses and resolut

National injustice is the surest road to national downfall.

I have known ninety-five of the world's great men in my time, and of these eighty-seven were followers of the Bible.

Books are delightful society. If you go into a room and find it full of books - even without taking them from the shelves they seem to speak to you, to bid you welcome.

Show me the manner in which a nation or a community cares for its dead and I will measure with mathematical exactness the tender sympathies of its people, their respect for the laws of the land and their loyalty to high ideals.