David Lloyd George Quotes

Restore the village life of England to its original brilliancy and glory. Every labourer should have half an acre as a right.

This is not the time to add one torch to the flame of discontent in this land. I speak with solemnity, watching what is going on in the industrial centres. For Heaven's sake, do not let us drive the farm labourer into the ranks of those in rebellion against society.

If it is right that the State should resume its authority over the land for the purposes of burying the dead, it is surely also right that it should exercise its ownership where it is necessary it should do so to feed the living.

I know the expense of this would not pay 1 per cent. interest. Perhaps not, but it would pay better than doles to rot men in idleness, and their work would leave the national estate for ever richer. On every account the best exchange for the workless is an exchange of the green doors of the Labour Bureau for the green fields of Britain.

Russia can play the fool and survive because no Government can destroy her natural resources, but if you have the anarchy which Bolshevism and revolution brings in this country, we shall be inevitably ruined.

At the last Election hon. Members opposite were very gallantly fighting against the flaming apostles of Zinovieff and beating them badly. To-night they are being herded into the Red Lobby. The hand that directs them will be the hand of the Patronage Secretary to the Treasury, but the voice that compels them is the voice of Mr. Cook.

Quite frankly, the Government were afraid of facing cold steel... The Home Secretary has been delivering a great many speeches recently about the Red peril. It really is no use barking at the Red Flag every time it cracks in the wind, whilst his chief is engaged in humbly gliding the flag staff—and with standard gold. Really it is very sad to see the Chancellor of the Exchequer assisting in that operation. He was very eager to fight the Reds on the Volga. I am very sorry to see him running away from them on the Thames and leaving his purse behind.

This is a Vote to spend £58,000,000 in protection of our trade routes. Our trade routes are in danger, but they are not in danger from navies. ... They are not naval, they are not military, they are not aerial; they are industrial, and the First Lord of the Admiralty has within the last few days been brought face to face with far and away the greatest danger to our trade routes. It is not in the Pacific; it is at home. It is no use sweeping the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean in order to see whether you can somehow or other find dangers to guard against. The danger is yawning in front of us, and the Government are marching into it, scanning the horizon with telescope glued to one eye, and the other closed.

The [Conservative] Government seemed hopeless and confused and without purpose... Unfortunately, the men who ought to be awake were slumbering, and in their dreams they babbled incoherencies about good will and subsidies... There had never been a more pitiful exhibition than that made by the Prime Minister in the debate on unemployment.

The action of the Government which had had the most disastrous effect on British trade was their premature and precipitate restoration of the gold standard before our credit was ripe for that departure. It had made sterling dearer and thus artificially put up the price of British goods in the neutral markets, where we were already competing on very narrow margins with our trade rivals. At this very hour coalowners and miners had been driven to the brink of a yawning chasm of strife, largely through this deed of egregious recklessness by the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Honestly, I cannot see how you are going to overcome these factors unless there is some determination by the nation as a whole to grip the problem and face it and deal with it as we dealt with the problems of the War, with courage, with initiative and, above all, without fear of departing from the ordinary channels. The thing that saved us in the War was that we were not afraid of doing something that had never been done before, and you will never get away from it... Honestly, if I had been there another three years, I should have learned something new. I am sick of this slavish adhesion to the Coalition policy.

It is no use simply saying, "Little children, love one another," if one set of children can get nearly all the toffee and the others have very little.

The world year by year is spinning rapidly away from that evil environment and the frenzy, carnage, and savagery. The firmament is clearing. The springtime of Liberalism is at hand, and with due labour we shall reap the harvest in season.

Socialism means the community in bonds. If you establish a Socialist community it means the most comprehensive, universal, and pervasive tyranny that this country has ever seen, the flaw that enters into everything in all the relations of life. It is like the sand of the desert. It gets into your food, your clothes, your machinery, the very air you breathe. They are all gritty with regulations, orders, decrees, rules. That is what Socialism means. You cannot trust liberty to Socialism. The only hope of liberty is in Liberalism, for Liberalism alone believes in it.

The one thing this country would not stand from a Tory Government was Toryism.