John Morley Quotes

Whether France or Italy or Germany or England has made the greatest contribution in the history of modern civilisation—however that speculative controversy may be settled, this at least is certain, that those are not wrong who hold that Germany's high and strict standard of competency, the purity and vigour of her administration of affairs, her splendid efforts and great success in all branches of science, her glories—for glories they are—in art and literature, and the fixed strength of character and duty in the German people entitle her national ideals to a supreme place among the greatest-ideals that now animate and guide the world. Do not let us forget all that. German ambition is a perfectly intelligible and even lofty ambition.

The decrepitude that ended in the Latin conquest of Constantinople at the beginning of the thirteenth century, and the Mahometan conquest in the middle of the fifteenth, is an awkward reproof to the optimist superstition that civilized communities are universally bound somehow or another to be progressive.

Montagu calls himself my disciple. I see very little of my teaching in him. This dyarchy won't work. As for his strange plea for rousing the masses of India out of their “pathetic content” by reforms for which they do not ask, and which they cannot work, it's a most unwise remark. My reforms were quite enough for a generation at least.

I hope...Her Majesty's Ministers...will...say that the Soudan must be left to its own people to work out their own deliverance in their own fashion.

‘Natural rights’...[is not] a true way of putting things—and certainly not the most useful and fertile way. Nature [is] simply the mastery of the strongest [and confers no rights on man]. Two savage tribes contend for a tract of land of wh. they are in need for their subsistence: nature gave the right to this land to the tribe wh. was strong enough to thrash the other. No right is worth a straw apart from the good that it brings: and all claims to rights must depend—not upon nature—but upon the good that the said rights are calculated to bring to the greatest number. General utility, public expediency, the greatest happiness of the greatest number—these are the tests and standards of a right; not the dictate of nature.

I am a theorist, but I detest the introduction of abstract principles into the great practical difficulties of this nation.

I freely recognise that it would be most stupid not to recognise that there is a sense in which the word imperialism is used in the sense of national duty, not national vainglory, in which it is used as meaning not aggression but the service of mankind... Imperialism in this higher and better sense must be tested and measured and limited by common sense and the Liberal party will only be useful as an instrument of human progress so long as they walk persistently and steadfastly in the path of these watchwords—peace, economy, and reform. If the Liberal party abandon that path, what will they be but a body without a soul?

I half wrote a discourse on modern democracy, how the rule of numbers is to be reconciled with the rule of sage judgment, and the passion for liberty and equality is to be reconciled with sovereign regard for law, authority, and order; and how our hopes for the future are to be linked to wise reverence for tradition and the past.

I'm all against your “autoritaire”. I don't believe in it, and I never did. Your Cromwells and Fredericks don't do their work half as well as slow sober free American citizens.

I submit that it is an Agreement that this country may not only be contented with, but proud of.

There are some books which cannot be adequately reviewed for twenty or thirty years after they come out.

You cannot demonstrate an emotion or prove an aspiration.

I'm sick of Wilson ... He hailed the Russian Revolution six months ago as the new Golden Age, and I said to Page, “What does he know of Russia?” to which Page replied, “Nothing.” As for his talk about a union of hearts after the war, the world is not made like that.

Do let us try to give a national, not a class tone to English politics .

I was always opposed to the Anglo-Russian agreement—so was Kitchener. Who stands most to gain out of this war? Russia. Who is the real aggressor? Russia. At the end of it we shall have her on our backs. What do you imagine will be the effect on the Indian mind of the employment of Indian troops against Europeans?