ROBERT GASCOYNE-CECIL, 3RD MARQUESS SALISBURY

Her Majesty should accept all his explanations without inquiring too narrowly into the truth of them.

All those who defend freedom are bound as their first duty to be the champions of minorities, and the danger of allowing the majority, which holds the power of the State, to interfere at its will is that the interests of the minority will be disregarded and crushed out under the omnipotent force of a popular vote

We must learn this rule, which is true alike of rich and poor — that no man and no class of men ever rise to any permanent improvement in their condition of body or of mind except by relying upon their own personal efforts. The wealth with which the rich man is surrounded is constantly tempting him to forget the truth, ad you see in family after family men degenerating from the position of their fathers because they live sluggishly and enjoy what has been placed before them without appealing to their own exertions. The poor man, especially in these days, may have a similar temptation offered to him by legislation, but this same inexorable rule will work.

I object to Parliament trying to regulate private morality in matters which only affects the person who commits the offence.

...institutions like the House of Lords must die, like all other organic beings, when their time comes.

Parliament is a potent engine, and its enactments must always do something, but they very seldom do what the originators of these enactments meant.

… by a free country I mean a country where people are allowed, so long as they do not hurt their neighbors, to do as they like. I do not mean a country where six men may make five men do exactly as they like. That is not my notion of freedom.

A party whose mission is to live entirely upon the discovery of grievances are apt to manufacture the element upon which they subsist.

It is right to be forward in the defense of the poor; no system that is not just as between rich and poor can hope to survive.

...when I am told that my ploughmen are capable citizens, it seems to me ridiculous to say that educated women are not just as capable.

A good deal of the political battle of the future will be a conflict between religion and unbelief:

...In practice it is found that International Law is always on the side of strong battalions...It is puerile...to apply to the dealings of a nation with its neighbor's territory the morality which would be applicable to two individuals possessing adjoining property, and protected from mutual wrong by a law superior to both.

...if our ancestors had cared for the rights of other people, the British empire would not have been made.

English [foreign] policy is to float lazily downstream, occasionally putting out a diplomatic boat-hook to avoid collisions.

The commonest error in politics is sticking to the carcass of dead policies.

The two parties represent two opposite moods of the English mind, which may be trusted, unless past experience is wholly useless, to succeed each other from time to time. Neither of them, neither the love of organic changes nor the dislike of it, can be described as normal to a nation. In every nation, they have succeeded each other at varying intervals during the whole of the period which separates its birth from its decay. Each finds in the circumstances and constitution of individuals a regular support which never deserts it. Among men, the old, the phlegmatic, the sober-minded, among classes, those who have more to lose than to gain by change, furnish the natural Conservatives. The young, the envious, the restless, the dreaming, those whose condition cannot easily be made worse, will be rerum novarum cupidi. But the two camps together will not nearly include the nation: for the vast mass of every nation is unpolitical.

Social stability is ensured, not by the cessation of the demand for change – for the needy and the restless will never cease to cry for it – but by the fact that change in its progress must at last hurt some class of men who are strong enough to arrest it.

So long as we have government by party, the very notion of repose must be foreign to English politics. Agitation is, so to speak, endowed in this country. There is a standing machinery for producing it. There are rewards which can only be obtained by men who excite the public mind, and devise means of persuading one set of persons that they are deeply injured by another.

Conflict in free states is the law of life.

Opinions upon moral questions are more often the expression of strongly felt expediency than of careful ethical reasoning

There can be no finality in politics.

The perils of change are so great the promise of the most hopeful theories is so often deceptive, that it is frequently the wiser part to uphold the existing state of things, if it can be done, even though, in point of argument, it should be utterly indefensible.

Wherever democracy has prevailed, the power of the State has been used in some form or other to plunder the well-to-do classes for the benefit of the poor.

The days and weeks of screwed-up smiles and laboured courtesy, the mock geniality, the hearty shake of the filthy hand, the chuckling reply that must be made to the coarse joke, the loathsome, choking compliment that must be paid to the grimy wife and sluttish daughter, the indispensable flattery of the vilest religious prejudices, the wholesale deglutition of hypocritical pledges.

We are not the same people that we have been, either in our social characteristics, in our patriotic sentiments, or in the tone of our moral and religious feelings.