William Ewart Gladstone Quotes

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.

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.

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.

Justice delayed is justice denied

Failure is success if we learn from it.

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

Be happy with what you have and are, be generous with both, and you won't have to haunt 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. -William Ewart Gladstone, British 19th century Prime Minister

It has been said that after meeting with the great British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, you left feeling he was the smartest person in the world, but after meeting with his rival Benjamin Disraeli, you left thinking you were the smartest person.1 —BONO

We know quite well that the people of the Northern States have not yet drunk of the cup -- they are still trying to hold it far from their lips -- which all the rest of the world see they nevertheless must drink of. We may have our own opinions about slavery; we may be for or against the South; but there is no doubt that Jefferson Davis and other leaders of the South have made an army; they are making, it appears, a navy; and they have made, what is more than either, they have made a nation.

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

books are the voices of the dead. They are a main instrument of communion with the vast human procession of the other world. They are the allies of the thought of man. They are in a certain sense at enmity with the world. Their work is, at least, in the two higher compartments of our threefold life. In a room well filled with them, no one has felt or can feel solitary. Second to none, as friends to the individual, they are first and foremost among the compages, the bonds and rivets of the race, onward from that time when they were first written on the tablets of Babylonia and Assyria, the rocks of Asia minor, and the monuments of Egypt, down to the diamond editions of Mr. Pickering and Mr. Frowde.

In 1872, Lubbock learned from a rector in rural Wiltshire that a big chunk of Avebury, an ancient circle of stones considerably larger than Stonehenge (though not so picturesquely composed), was about to be cleared away for new housing. Lubbock bought the threatened land, along with two other ancient monuments nearby, West Kennett Long Barrow and Silbury Hill (an enormous manmade mound—the largest in Europe), but clearly he couldn’t protect every worthy thing that grew threatened, so he began to press for legislation to safeguard historic treasures. Realizing this ambition was not nearly as straightforward as common sense would suggest it ought to be, because the ruling Tories under Benjamin Disraeli saw it as an egregious assault on property rights. The idea of giving a government functionary the right to come onto the land of a person of superior caste and start telling him how to manage his estate was preposterous—outrageous. Lubbock persevered, however, and in 1882, under the new Liberal government of William Ewart Gladstone, he managed to push through Parliament the Ancient Monuments Protection Act—a landmark piece of legislation if ever there was one. Because

The binding of a book is the dress with which it walks out into the world. The paper, type and ink are the body, in which its soul is domiciled. And these three, soul, body, and habilament, are a triad which ought to be adjusted to one another by the laws of harmony and good sense.

Nothing that is morally wrong can be politically right.

The hinge of the whole situation was this: the government itself was not to be a substantive power in matters of Finance, but was to leave the Money Power supreme and unquestioned.

To be engaged in opposing wrong affords, under the conditions of our mental constitution, but a slender guarantee for being right.

Upon one great class of subjects, the largest and the most weighty of them all, where the leading and determining considerations that ought to lead to a conclusion are truth, justice, and humanity, there, gentlemen, all the world over, I will back the masses against the classes.

We ought to recollect ... that a book consists, like man, from whom it draws its lineage, of a body and a soul.