All the world over, I will back the masses against the classes.
—William Ewart Gladstone
Topics: Class
Man is to be trained chiefly by studying and by knowing man.
—William Ewart Gladstone
Topics: Man
Intoxicating drinks have produced evils more deadly, because more continuous, than all those caused to mankind by the great historic scourges of war, famine, and pestilence combined.
—William Ewart Gladstone
Topics: Drunkenness
The free expression of opinion, as experience has taught us, is the safety-valve of passion. The noise of the rushing steam, when it escapes, alarms the timid; but it is the sign that we are safe. The concession of reasonable privilege anticipates the growth of furious appetite.
—William Ewart Gladstone
Topics: Opinions, Opinion
To comprehend a man’s life, it is necessary to know not merely what he does, but also what he purposely leaves undone. 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 resolutely follows the best.
—William Ewart Gladstone
Topics: Knowledge, Wisdom
The proper function of a government is to make it easy for the people to do good and difficult for them to do evil.
—William Ewart Gladstone
Topics: Government
Man himself is the crowning wonder of creation; the study of his nature the noblest study the world affords.
—William Ewart Gladstone
Topics: Man
Remember the rights of the savage, as we call him. Remember that the happiness of his humble home, remember that the sanctity of his 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.
—William Ewart Gladstone
Duty is a power that rises with us in the morning, and goes to rest with us at night. It is co-extensive with the action of our intelligence. It is the shadow that cleaves to us, go where we will.
—William Ewart Gladstone
Topics: Duty
Be happy with what you have and are, be generous with both, and you won’t have to hunt for happiness.
—William Ewart Gladstone
Topics: Contentment
The three highest titles that can be given a man are those of a martyr, hero, saint.
—William Ewart Gladstone
Topics: Titles
Believe me when I tell you that thrift of time will repay you in after life, with a usury of profit beyond your most sanguine dreams; and that waste of it will make you dwindle, alike in intellectual and moral stature, beyond your darkest reckoning.
—William Ewart Gladstone
Topics: Time, Value of Time, Time Management
The effective public speaker receives from his audience in vapor, what he pours back on them in a flood.
—William Ewart Gladstone
You cannot fight against the future. Time is on our side.
—William Ewart Gladstone
Topics: Fighting, Correction, Reform
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.
—William Ewart Gladstone
Topics: Logic
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.
—William Ewart Gladstone
Topics: Mediocrity
Nothing that is morally wrong can be politically right.
—William Ewart Gladstone
Topics: Ethics
But the virtues we acquire by first exercising them,
as is the case with all the arts,
for it is by doing what we ought to do when we have
learnt the arts that we learn the arts themselves;
we become builders by building and harpists
by playing the harp. Similarly it is by doing just
acts that we become just, by doing temperate acts
that we become temperate, by doing courageous acts
that we become courageous.
—William Ewart Gladstone
Topics: Work
It is the duty of government to make it difficult for people to do wrong, easy to do right.
—William Ewart Gladstone
Topics: Government
Justice delayed is justice denied.
—William Ewart Gladstone
Topics: Justice
Nothing can be hostile to religion which is agreeable to justice.
—William Ewart Gladstone
Topics: Religion
No man ever became great or good except through many and great mistakes.
—William Ewart Gladstone
Topics: Mistakes, Great, Good, Mistake, Failure
The thirst for an enduring fame is near akin to the love of true excellence; but the fame of the moment is a dangerous possession and a bastard motive; and he who does his acts in order that the echo of them may come back as a soft music in his ears, plays false to his noble destiny as a Christian man, places himself in continual danger of dallying with wrong, and taints even his virtuous actions at their source.
—William Ewart Gladstone
Topics: Fame
Here is my first principle of foreign policy: good government at home
—William Ewart Gladstone
Topics: Government
How little do politics affect the life, the moral life of a nation. One single good book influences the people a vast deal more.
—William Ewart Gladstone
Topics: Politics
Good laws make it easier to do right and harder to do wrong.
—William Ewart Gladstone
Topics: Lawyers, Law
The contemporary mind may in rare cases be taken by storm; but posterity never. The tribunal of the present is accessible to influence; that of the future is incorrupt.
—William Ewart Gladstone
Topics: Judgment
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.
—William Ewart Gladstone
Topics: Freedom
Liberalism is trust of the people tempered by prudence. Conservatism is distrust of the people tempered by fear.
—William Ewart Gladstone
Topics: Trust, Liberalism
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.
—William Ewart Gladstone
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Benjamin Disraeli British Head of State
- Winston Churchill British Head of State
- David Lloyd George British Liberal Statesman
- Harold Macmillan British Head of State
- Ramsay MacDonald British Head of State
- John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn British Statesman
- Neville Chamberlain British Head of State
- Margaret Thatcher British Head of State
- Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton British Author, Politician
- E. F. L. Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax British Politician
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