William E. Gladstone famous quotes

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

#Inspirational #Happiness #Being Happy

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.
-- William E. Gladstone

#Love #Life #Peace

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.
-- William E. Gladstone

#Book #Rooms #Welcome

Liberalism is trust of the people tempered by prudence. Conservatism is distrust of the people tempered by fear.
-- William E. Gladstone

#Trust #Fear #People

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 E. Gladstone

#Cheer #Tea #Calm

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.
-- William E. Gladstone

#Inspirational #Mean #Destiny

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.
-- William E. Gladstone

#Loyalty #Law #Land

Good laws make it easier to do right and harder to do wrong.
-- William E. Gladstone

#Law #Easier #Harder

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

#Dream #Time Management #Profit

All the world over, I will back the masses against the classes.
-- William E. Gladstone

#Class #Political #World

Here is my first principle of foreign policy: good government at home.
-- William E. Gladstone

#Home #Government #Firsts

No one ever became great except through many and great mistakes.
-- William E. Gladstone

#Success #Mistake

Selfishness is the greatest curse of the human race.
-- William E. Gladstone

#Selfish #Race #Curse

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 E. Gladstone

#Mistake #Math #Men

Nothing that is morally wrong can be politically right.
-- William E. Gladstone

#Inspirational #Peace #Politics

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

#Constitution #Parliament #British

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.
-- William E. Gladstone

#Class #Roots #Kingdoms

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

#Ignorance #May #Remember

To be engaged in opposing wrong affords but a slender guarantee for being right.
-- William E. Gladstone

#Guarantees #Slender

Man is to be trained chiefly by studying and by knowing man.
-- William E. Gladstone

#Men #Knowing #Study

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

#Teeth #Use #Members

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!
-- William E. Gladstone

#Book #House #Unhappy

You cannot fight against future. Time is on its side.
-- William E. Gladstone

#Time #Future #Fighting

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 E. Gladstone

#Successful #Mediocrity #Poet

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.
-- William E. Gladstone

#God #Humble #Eye

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 E. Gladstone

#Loyalty #Freedom #Order

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

#Excess #Rivals #May

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.
-- William E. Gladstone

#Men #Political #Venture

Decision by majorities is as much an expedient as lighting by gas.
-- William E. Gladstone

#Decision #Majority #Gas

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.
-- William E. Gladstone

#Important #Taxation #Firsts

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.
-- William E. Gladstone

#Character #Evil #Attendance

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

#Ideas #Income #Economy

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 .
-- William E. Gladstone

#Party #Thinking #People

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 .
-- William E. Gladstone

#Guarantees #Excess #Rivals

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 .
-- William E. Gladstone

#Design #Effort #Independence

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

#Mind #World #Revelations

Commerce is the equalizer of the wealth of nations.
-- William E. Gladstone

#Wealth #Wealth Of Nations #Commerce

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.
-- William E. Gladstone

#Death #Science #Action

He is the purest figure in history. About George Washington
-- William E. Gladstone

#History #Figures

Nothing more surely cultivates and embellishes a man than association with refined and virtuous women.
-- William E. Gladstone

#Men #Association #Virtuous Woman

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

#Country #Practice #Evil

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

#Government #People #Easy

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

#War #Drug #Degrees

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

#Bible #Men #World

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 E. Gladstone

#Power #Germany #Purpose

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.
-- William E. Gladstone

#Needs #Grammar #Certain

To serve Armenia is to serve civilization.
-- William E. Gladstone

#Civilization #Armenia

The American Revolution was a vindication of liberties inherited and possessed. It was a conservative revolution.
-- William E. Gladstone

#Liberty #Revolution #Conservative

One example is worth a thousand arguments.
-- William E. Gladstone

#Example #Argument #Thousand

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.
-- William E. Gladstone

#Work #Political #Letters

Is not that state a warning and a judgment for our heavy sins as a nation?
-- William E. Gladstone

#History #Warning #Sin

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.
-- William E. Gladstone

#Men #Historical #Brain

Ireland, Ireland. That cloud in the west, that coming storm.
-- William E. Gladstone

#Clouds #Political #Storm

Justice delayed is justice denied.
-- William E. Gladstone

#Law #Justice #Fairness

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?
-- William E. Gladstone

#Country #Government #Greek

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.
-- William E. Gladstone

#Men #Sorrow #Purpose

National injustice is the surest road to national downfall.
-- William E. Gladstone

#Justice #Social Justice #Injustice

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.
-- William E. Gladstone

#Years #History #Stupidity