Stanley Baldwin Quotes

I would rather trust a woman's instinct than a man's reason.

I would rather be an opportunist and float than go to the bottom with my principles around my neck.

War would end if the dead could return.

A platitude is simply a truth repeated till people get tired of hearing it.

Kennedy echoed Stanley Baldwin that a democracy is always two years behind a dictator.

Six years previously, Miss Brodie had led her new class into the garden for a history lesson underneath the big elm. On the way through the school corridors they passed the headmistress's study. The door was wide open, the room was empty. 'Little girls,' said Miss Brodie, 'come and observe this.' They clustered round the open door while she pointed to a large poster pinned with drawing-pins on the opposite wall within the room. It depicted a man's big face. Underneath were the words 'Safety First'. 'This is Stanley Baldwin who got in as Prime Minister and got out again ere long,' said Miss Brodie. 'Miss Mackay retains him on the wall because she believes in the slogan "Safety First". But Safety does not come first. Goodness, Truth and Beauty come first. Follow me.

What the proprietorship of these papers is aiming at is power, and power without responsibility — the prerogative of the harlot through the ages. [Baldwin was attacking the leading press barons of his day (Lord Beaverbrook and Lord Rothermere); the phrase was suggested by Baldwin's cousin Rudyard Kipling (17 March 1931)]

Ninguno de los tres primeros ministros británicos de la década de 1930 —Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin y Neville Chamberlain— había tenido jamás el más mínimo roce personal con ese extremismo, lo que explica en parte su trágica tardanza en discernir la naturaleza de la ideología nazi. Churchill, en cambio, había combatido en su juventud ese sectarismo orate, y eso le permitió detectar antes que nadie las características más sobresalientes del hitlerismo.

Stanley Baldwin, then deputy prime minister, gave the House of Commons a forecast of what was to come: “I think it is well for the man in the street to realize that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through.” The only effective defense lay in offense, he said, “which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves.

On November 10, 1932, Stanley Baldwin, then deputy prime minister, gave the House of Commons a forecast of what was to come: “I think it is well for the man in the street to realize that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through.” The only effective defense lay in offense, he said, “which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves.

[Tennessee] William's writing has the effect that all great writing has on an actor. It steadies you. It emboldens you You ride an elevator to the top floor of a building, you jump off the penthouse balcony, and you fly. Just put one foot in front of the other, one line after the other, one moment after the other, and you are walking on air. It was the creative experience of a lifetime. (playing Stanley in Streetcar Named Desire)

You know what Stanley Baldwin said about Churchill?” Baldwin, a Conservative, had been prime minister before Chamberlain. “When Winston was born, lots of fairies swooped down on his cradle with gifts—imagination, eloquence, industry, ability—and then came a fairy who said: ‘No person has a right to so many gifts,’ picked him up, and gave him such a shake and a twist that he was denied judgment and wisdom.

Commercial men weren’t looked down upon as they had been in old England; for, after all, this was an industrial age, and business and politics were pretty thoroughly mixed. The recent Prime Minister, Mr. Stanley Baldwin, had been an ironmaster, and the present Prime Minister, Mr. Neville Chamberlain, was an arms manufacturer from Birmingham.

Although Britain went along with the League’s economic sanctions, it stopped short of more extreme measures, such as cutting off all supplies of oil. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin instructed his foreign secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare, “Keep us out of the war, Sam. We are not ready for it.”25

The British desire to appease Germany before 1933 is intelligible in the light of the reign of liberalism; appeasement, as an enlightened policy of justice for all, including Germany, was a child of that outlook. For over a decade it was promoted (ineffectually, because of French recalcitrance) by men as diverse as J.M. Keynes and Ramsay MacDonald, Gilbert Murray and Stanley Baldwin. But appeasement did not end with the ascent of Hitler to the chancellorship. In this respect, 1933–1935 marked a watershed; appeasement, gradually but perceptibly, changed from a policy based on 'morality' and on a quest for 'justice' to one compelled by fear and expediency. Thus appeasement changed its meaning.

He’s like Stanley Baldwin,’ thought Travers: ‘I’d rather be an opportunist and float than go to the bottom with my principles around my neck.’ Just

Initially Tories regarded the 1918 franchise with deep apprehension – none more so than Stanley Baldwin, the shrewd, bluff Worcestershire businessman who was party leader for fourteen years from 1923 to 1937 and prime minister on three occasions (1923–4, 1924–9 and 1935–7). Although the family's iron and steel business made Baldwin a very wealthy man, his approach to both business and politics was paternalistic and inclusive – in short, a ‘One Nation’ Tory. And from his mother's more cultured family (the painter Edward Burne-Jones was an uncle and Rudyard Kipling one of his cousins) Baldwin derived a keen, often romanticized sense of England's heritage

Thirty-five years later Stanley Baldwin was to attack some left-wing members of the Tory Party, such as Harold Macmillan and Robert Boothby, when they were associating rather closely with Lloyd George, for ‘hunting with packs other than their own’. The Hooligans could have been attacked on similar grounds. Such records as survive seem to suggest that they spent far more of their time with the right wing of the Liberal Party than they did with their Tory colleagues.