Asquith Quotes

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze." (Letter to Cynthia Asquith, November 1913)

[Jean Harlow] 'Say - aren't you Margot Asquith?' (pronouncing the hard 't') [Margot Asquith] 'Yes Dear, But the 't' is silent, as in Harlow.

During terms, Professor Marsden lives in Cambridge with his wife, chess player extraordinaire and distinguished physician and surgeon Bryony Asquith Marsden. His favorite time of day is half past six in the evening, when he meets Mrs. Marsden’s train at the station, as the latter returns from her day in London. On Sunday afternoons, rain or shine, Professor and Mrs. Marsden take a walk along The Backs, and treasure growing old together.

There is no record what Asquith replied or what, in his inmost mind, a region difficult to penetrate under the best of circumstances, he thought on this crucial question.

William Asquith Farnaby was nothing but a muddy filter, on the hither side of which human beings, nature, and even his beloved art had emerged bedimmed and bemired, less, other and uglier than themselves.

Whether Venetia and Asquith had ever had a physical relationship remained for all but them an unresolved question, although if word volume alone were a measure of romantic intensity, Asquith was a man lost irreclaimably to love.

There is no end to the grotesque absurdities that would follow the passing of this measure. It would be possible for women to have a vote while living in a state of prostitution; if she married and became an honest woman she would lose that vote, but she could regain it through divorce.’25 A regular criticism of Churchill was that, as Asquith put it to his close friend Venetia Stanley,* ‘Winston thinks with his mouth,’ meaning that he adopted policies because they sounded good in speeches.

We desire no conquest, no dominion, we seek no indemnities, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make.

Death is a part of this life and not the next.

It is never good dwelling on goodbyes. It is not the being together that it prolongs, it is the parting.

Honor is defined as "honesty and integrity in one's beliefs and actions," integrity being "adherence to moral principle and character." Words like these are not heard much in our public discourse today. But I believe these words and what they represent are the bedrock of effective leadership. If you seek to lead men and women, you must persuade them to follow you. That means they must trust you. Herbert Asquith, British prime minister from 1908-1916, wrote, "To speak with the tongue of men and angels, and to spend laborious days and nights in administration, is no good if a man does not inspire trust." A leader's actions must match his words. People must believe he means what he says, that his promises matter and are not just idle rhetoric. Integrity in action becomes moral authority, and it is moral authority that moves people to follow someone even at personal risk or sacrifice-- or even when they disagree.

The home the military top brass had created for themselves was "picturesque, romantic and unreal", he wrote. "It was as though men were playing at war here, while others 60 miles away were fighting and dying in mud and gas-waves and explosive barrages.

Second Lieutenant Walter Tull, whose body was never recovered, was the first black man to be commissioned as an infantry officer in the British Army. He was born in Folkestone in 1888, the son of a Barbadian carpenter and a Kent farm labourer's daughter. His grandmother had been a slave.

My dear wife, my dear parents and all I love, I have been wounded. I hope it will be nothing, Care well for the children, my dear Lucie; Leopold will help you if I don't get out of this. I have a crushed thigh and am all alone in a shell hole. I hope they will soon come to fetch me. My last thought is of you.

I use the word smile for lack of a better word, but how to convey the beauty of the indefinable expression that transfigured that time-worn face? Tender triumph; gentle joy, rapturous reverence. What mystery did I witness? It was like iron frost yielding to sunshine -- the thawing of grief in the dawn-radiance of some unsurmisable redemption.

A volunteer nurse for the British Red Cross, she followed her surgeon husband, Sir John Bradford, to northern France at the outbreak of the war and spent the duration of the conflict performing the remarkable yet unsung role of "hospital letter writer" for injured soldiers either too unwell or too illiterate to communicate with family members scattered across the globe.

The Education Department controls the education given, and it is planned on foreign models, and its object is to serve foreign rather than native ends, to make docile Government servants rather than patriotic citizens; high spirits, courage, self-respect, are not encouraged, and docility is regarded as the most precious quality in the student; pride in country, patriotism, ambition, are looked on as dangerous, and English, instead of Indian, Ideals are exalted; the blessings of a foreign rule and the incapacity of Indians to manage their own affairs are constantly inculcated. What wonder that boys thus trained often turn out, as men, time-servers and sycophants, and, finding their legitimate ambitions frustrated, become selfish and care little for the public weal? Their own inferiority has been so driven into them during their most impressionable years, that they do not even feel what Mr. Asquith called the "intolerable degradation of a foreign yoke." India's

The French suffered 531,000 casualties (dead, wounded and captured) in those three months, roughly as many as in the eight months of Verdun in 1916. The British (including Empire troops) had 411,000 casualties - almost exactly the same as in the four-and-a-half months of the Somme. The Americans suffered 127,000 casualties, more than double the total number of American casualties in the Vietnam War. German casualties were devastating: 785,000 killed and wounded and 386,000 prisoners - more than a million men in three months.

A good induction program can include a pre-school-year workshop, a welcome center, a bus tour of the neighborhood, study groups, mentors and coaches, portfolios and videos, demonstration classrooms, administrative support, and learning circles. It should last for at least three years.

In 1910, the Prime Minister moved Churchill to the Home Office, where he took a strong interest, shared by many other contemporaries, in the pseudo-science of eugenics. He believed that the mentally and physically defective should be sterilized, in part for national-imperial reasons. He told Asquith: ‘I am convinced that the multiplication of the Feeble-Minded, which is proceeding now at an artificial rate, unchecked by any of the old restraints of nature, and actually fostered by civilised conditions, is a very terrible danger to the race.’14

will give a second

Horne was both a Congregational minister and a member of the British parliament. He had a reputation for eloquence in the House of Commons, and for passion in the pulpit. H. H. Asquith often went to hear him preach because, he said, “he had a fire in his belly.” Being both a politician and a preacher, he was able from personal experience to compare the two vocations, and he had no doubt which was the more influential: The preacher, who is the messenger of God, is the real master of society; not elected by society to be its ruler, but elect of God to form its ideals and through them to guide and rule its life. Show me the man who, in the midst of a community however secularized in manners, can compel it to think with him, can kindle its enthusiasm, revive its faith, cleanse its passions, purify its ambitions, and give steadfastness to its will, and I will show you the real master of society, no matter what party may nominally hold the reins of government, no matter what figurehead may occupy the ostensible place of authority.48

She was lovely, and she drove the hearts and the purses of men as a breath drives a thin sheet of flame.

The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the Feeble-Minded and Insane classes, coupled as it is with a steady restriction among all the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate. Winston Churchill in a letter to Prime Minister Asquith, advocating the forced sterilisation of disabled people

It only increased Margaret's dislike of her name when young Elizabeth, whom the family called Lilibet, insisted on referring to her baby sister as "Bud". "She's not a real rose yet, is she? She's only a bud." Elizabeth, who was four years Margaret's senior, pertly told Lady Cynthia Asquith.

I sometimes find myself looking at a young child with little short of awe, sir, knowing that within its mind is a scene of peace and paradise of which we older folk have no notion, and which will fade away out of it, as life wears on, like the mere tabernacling of a dream.

During a sinister interchange between one of the little princes and his wicked uncle, Richard III, the prince wonders how truth is passed down the ages - whether through the written or the spoken word (3.1.75-83). The prince believes, he says innocently, that the history of the Tower of London - a choice of subject never far from the minds of English Catholics - would survive simply by word of mouth, even if it were never written down. The little prince has stepped into dangerous territory. He is not only defending the role of tradition against scripture - a central Catholic Reformation stance - but he also suggests that the grisly truth about England's persecutions will survive irrespective of what appears in history books.

Churchill privately expressed his doubts about the Prime Minister. In particular, he wrote, he worried over Asquith’s nighttime drinking.

The prime minister’s daughter, Violet Asquith—now Violet Bonham-Carter after marriage—later

political position. Back in

earlier wars, and in the Second World War, generals, even marshals, also ran risks and died in action. In the First World War they led comfortable lives. All except Kitchener. He was the only outstanding military figure on either side who came to a violent end. Asquith

Of what help is anyone who can only be approached with the right words

To others we are not ourselves but performers in their lives cast in a part we don't even know we are playing.

Life often teaches us how to perfect our weaknesses than how to develop our strengths.

We often call a certainty a hope, to bring it luck.

He is invariably in a hurry. Being in a hurry is one of the tributes he pays in life.

Being in a hurry is one of the tributes he pays to life.

What we buy belongs to us only when the price is forgotten.

The image of ourselves in the minds of others is the picture of a stranger we will never see.

It is easier to be generous than to be just.

Winter draws what summer paints.

Blessed are those that give without remembering and take without forgetting.

Seeing through is rarely seeing into.

It is sometimes the man that opens the door who is the last to enter the room.

Endurance is frequently a form of indecision.

Modesty is hard: to try is not to try.

I continued: "Mr. Asquith has said that the parents of children have a right to be consulted in the matter of their children's education, especially upon such questions as the kind of religious instruction they should receive. Women are parents. Does not Mr. Asquith think that women should have the right to control their children's education, as men do, through the vote?

I shall leave this farmhouse very soon. The people are all right, but they are people, and therefore insufferable.

This was ‘a very terrible danger to the race’, he told Asquith in December 1910, and he advocated a policy of compulsory sterilisation to purify that ‘race’, with 100,000 to start with. Thirty years later Churchill would imperishably say that, were the Third Reich to triumph, the whole world, ‘will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science’. Here was one awful historical irony: the perverted science of National Socialism, beginning with sterilisation and proceeding to extermination, was what Churchill himself had once favoured, taken to a hideous conclusion.

Whatever was found new in Lazarus’ face and gestures was thought to be some trace of a grave illness and of the shocks recently experienced. Evidently, the destruction wrought by death on the corpse was only arrested by the miraculous power, but its effects were still apparent; and what death had succeeded in doing with Lazarus’ face and body, was like an artist’s unfinished sketch seen under thin glass.

Ah, it was worth ten years of a man’s life to be dead then! Everything was pleasant. I was in a good neighborhood, for all the dead people that lived near me belonged to the best families in the city.

Both Biruté and Jane are firmly rooted in the world of human endeavor. Jane has not become a chimp; Biruté has not become an orangutan. Yet the lives of all three women have been transformed by their visions; they are inexorably linked to the other nations through which they have traveled. In a sense they are, in the words of Henry Beston, living by voices we shall never hear; they are gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained. You need only listen to Jane’s excitement at seeing “a tree laden with luscious fruit”—fruit that to human senses is so tart it prompts a grimace. You need only remember how Dian would sing to the gorillas a gorilla song—praising the taste of rotting wood. You need only imagine what goes through Biruté’s mind when she does the “fruit stare” of the orangutan. Western scientists do not like to talk about these things, for to do so is to voice what for so long has been considered unspeakable. The bonds between human and animal and the psychic tools of empathy and intuition have been “coded dark” by Western science—labeled as hidden, implicit, unspoken. The truths through which we once explained our world, the truths spoken by the ancient myths, have been hushed by the louder voice of passionless scientific objectivity. But perhaps we are rediscovering the ancient truths. In his book Life of the Japanese Monkeys, the renowned Japanese primate researcher Kawai Masao outlines a new concept, upon which his research is built: he calls it kyokan, which translates as “feel-one.” He struck upon the concept after observing a female researcher on his team interacting with female Japanese macaques. “We [males] had always found it more difficult to distinguish among female [macaques],” he wrote. “However, a female researcher who joined our study could recognize individual females easily and understood their behavior, personality and emotional life better. . . . I had never before thought that female monkeys and women could immediately understand each other,” he wrote. “This revelation made me feel I had touched upon the essence of the feel-one method.” Masao’s book, unavailable to Western readers until translated into English by Pamela Asquith in 1981, explains that kyokan means “becoming fused with the monkeys’ lives where, through an intuitive channel, feelings are mutually exchanged.” Embodied in the kyokan approach is the idea that it is not only desirable to establish a feeling of shared life and mutual attachment with the study animals—to “feel one” with them—but that this feeling is necessary for proper science, for discovering truth. “It is our view that by positively entering the group, by making contact at some level, objectivity can be established,” Masao wrote. Masao is making a call for the scientist to return to the role of the ancient shaman: to “feel one” with the animals, to travel within their nations, to allow oneself to become transformed, to see what ordinary people cannot normally see. And this, far more than the tables of data, far more than the publications and awards, is the pioneering achievement of Jane Goodall, Biruté Galdikas, and Dian Fossey: they have dared to reapproach the Other and to sanctify the unity we share with those other nations that are, in Beston’s words, “caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.

THE REASON WHY all this has to be stated here is simply that women, who could state it much better, have almost unanimously refrained from discussing such matters at all. One finds, indeed, a sort of general conspiracy, infinitely alert and jealous, against the publication of the esoteric wisdom of the sex, and even against the acknowledgment that any such body of erudition exists at all. Men, having more vanity and less discretion, are a good deal less cautious. There is, in fact, a whole literature of masculine babbling, ranging from Machiavelli's appalling confession of political theory to the egoistic confidences of such men as Nietzsche, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Casanova, Max Stirner, Benvenuto Cellini, Napoleon Bonaparte and Lord Chesterfield. But it is very rarely that a Marie Bashkirtsev or Margot Asquith lets down the veils which conceal the acroamatic doctrine of the other sex. It is transmitted from mother to daughter, so to speak, behind the door. One observes its practical workings, but hears little about its principles. The causes of this secrecy are obvious. Women, in the last analysis, can prevail against men in the great struggle for power and security only by keeping them disarmed, and, in the main, unwarned. In a pitched battle, with the devil taking the hindmost, their physical and economic inferiority would inevitably bring them to disaster. Thus they have to apply their peculiar talents warily, and with due regard to the danger of arousing the foe. He must be attacked without any formal challenge, and even without any suspicion of challenge. This strategy lies at the heart of what Nietzsche called the slave morality--in brief, a morality based upon a concealment of egoistic purpose, a code of ethics having for its foremost character a bold denial of its actual aim.

Hasta mediados de 1915, las animosas multitudes de voluntarios habían excedido en mucho a nuestra capacidad para equiparlos y organizarlos. Habían acudido ya libremente más de tres millones de hombres que representaban lo que había de mejor y más fuerte en el patriotismo de la nación británica. Pero, hacia el verano de 1915, las salidas fueron ya superiores a las entradas y resultó evidente que no podría mantenerse en campaña en 1916 un ejército de 70 divisiones y menos aún de 100, sin adoptar medidas completamente nuevas. La escuela liberal pura, capitaneada por el primer ministro, era partidaria de hacer nuevos esfuerzos con la reclutación voluntaria, pero la mayor parte de los ministros conservadores, apoyados por mister Lloyd George, y también por mí hasta mi salida del Gobierno, estaban convencidos de que era inevitable el servicio obligatorio inmediato. Por entonces, lord Kitchener, orgulloso con razón de la admirable respuesta que habían encontrado sus sucesivos llamamientos de voluntarios, se inclinaba en aquella época del lado de mister Asquith y hacía pesar la balanza contra la adopción del servido militar obligatorio. Pero la guerra seguía su curso sin compasión y, ya en enero de 1916, bajo la fuerza imperiosa de las circunstancias, la crisis del Gabinete sobre el asunto del reclutamiento se renovó violentamente, siendo entonces reforzada la cruel necesidad de los hechos por un movimiento de opinión de carácter moral que excitó el apasionamiento de grandes masas de la población. Habían partido voluntariamente tres millones y medio, pero no eran bastantes. ¿Habían de volver al frente en virtud de su compromiso voluntario, cualquiera que fuese el número de veces que resultaran heridos? ¿Habían de empujarse a la lucha voluntarios maduros, debilitados y quebrantados, mientras cientos de miles de jóvenes robustos vivían en lo posible su vida ordinaria? ¿Había de obligarse a continuar a los ciudadanos del ejército territorial y a los soldados del ejército regular, cuyos compromisos habían expirado, mientras otros que no habían hecho ningún sacrificio no eran obligados siquiera a iniciarlos? De tres millones y medio de familias cuyo amado sostén, cuyo héroe, lo estaba sacrificando todo libremente para la causa de su país, familias que representaban los elementos más sanos sobre los que descansaba la vida entera de la nación, surgió la petición de que no se dilatara la victoria ni se prolongara la matanza porque otros rehusaran cumplir con su deber. Al fin, a fines de enero, lord Kitchener cambió de bando y mister Asquith tuvo que ceder. Solo un ministro, sir John Simon, dimitió de su cargo, y la ley de reclutamiento fue presentada al Parlamento y aprobada rápidamente por una mayoría aplastante.

Religion in life is either an amusement and a soporific or a sham and a swindle.

tears’ after he told her simply: ‘It’s all up.’26 Churchill was the exception. He told Violet Asquith on 22 February 1915: I think a curse should rest on me – because I love this war. I know it’s smashing & shattering the lives of thousands every moment – & yet – I can’t help it – I enjoy every second

Violet Asquith had begun to accompany her father to meetings in the hopes of encountering Winston.

Asquith, in the House, had shocked many people by opposing the franchise for women on the grounds that woman was not the female of the human species but a distinct and inferior species of her own, and disqualified from voting in the same way that a rabbit was disqualified. When it was reported there were angry letters and much protest in the press, together with several satirical cartoons about the lapine origins of various public figures. Someone commented that Asquith’s ‘rabbit theory’ made it difficult to vote Liberal and then look the women of one’s household in the face.

Now, in cross-examination, the witnesses Asquith, George, Grey, Simon, Runciman, and indeed nearly all the plaintiffs, have confessed that they have been guilty from time to time of legislation, or proposals for legislation, of which the main purpose was to make people do something which they did not wish to do, or prevent people from doing something they did wish to do. Few of them could point to an item in their legislative programmes which had any other purpose, and, with the single exception of Mr. Haddock, they have no legislation to suggest of which the purpose is to allow people to do something which they cannot do already. On the contrary, it appears, they are as anxious as any other party in Parliament to make rules and regulations for the eating, drinking, sleeping, and breathing of the British citizen... Mr. Haddock's own programme is simple: (a) to propose no legislation unless its purpose is to allow people to do what they like, and (b) to support no legislation whose purpose is to stop people from doing what they like. "Which is the Liberal Party?

A trial judge should be quick, courteous and wrong. That is not to say that the Court of Appeal should be slow, rude and right, for that would be usurping the role of the House of Lords.

Por regla general, los monarcas solían ser conservadores, pero los acontecimientos recientes habían acentuado aún más el sentimiento de animadversión del rey. Había ascendido al trono en plena crisis política y, contra su voluntad, se había visto obligado por el primer ministro liberal H. H. Asquith —con el pleno respaldo de la opinión pública— a recortar el poder de la Cámara de los Lores. La herida de aquella humillación aún seguía abierta, y Su Majestad sabía que Fitz, como par conservador de la Cámara de los Lores, había luchado con todas sus fuerzas contra la llamada reforma.

One of the revelations of the coded readings is that Shakespeare's 'bad' work always has a purpose, albeit a purpose that relates to a topical context we no longer recognize.

No one who has not been through it can know the chilly, paralyzing, deadening depression of hope deferred and energy wasted and vitality run to seed. I sometimes think it is the most tragic thing in life.

Of all human troubles, the most hateful is to feel you have the capacity of power and yet you have no field to exercise it.

The Economic Consequences of the Peace denounced the folly of the peacemakers in trying to extort from Germany an indemnity it could not possibly pay. He foresaw that attempts to make it pay would destroy the economic mechanisms on which the pre-war prosperity of Continental Europe had depended. He predicted a war of vengeance by Germany. There were memorable portraits of the leading peacemakers, Georges Clemenceau and Woodrow Wilson, though he left out the sketch of Lloyd George on Asquith’s advice.

The Liberals were in a minority, but were strongly backed by the Irish Nationalists, even though they were themselves divided between pro- and anti-Parnellite factions. Gladstone’s last government included three subsequent Liberal prime ministers – Rosebery, Henry Campbell-Bannerman and H.H. Asquith, but his closest associate was John Morley, the Irish Chief Secretary, who was later to write his biography in three extensive volumes.