Top 15 John Morley Quotes

Present party designations have become empty of all contents...Vastly extended State expenditure, vastly increased demands from the taxpayer who has to provide the money, social reform regardless of expense, cash exacted from the taxpayer already at his wits' end—when were the problems of plus and minus more desperate? How are we to measure the use and abuse of industrial organization? Powerful orators find "Liberty" the true keyword, but the I remember hearing from a learned student that of "liberty" he knew well over two hundred definitions. Can we be sure that the "haves" and the "have-nots" will agree in their selection of the right one? We can only trust to the growth of responsibility; we may look to circumstances and events to teach their lesson.

My only consolation has been to read up the history of Ireland in Lecky and our abominable treatment of her. All the faults of the Irish character are traceable to that.

Let us look at the history of Ireland, the history of this chronic government by coercion. What does it mean? It was the naked government of another Kingdom by irresponsible force—irresponsible, that is to say, as regards those whom this system was to affect. Coercion Laws were passed, and were smoothly, described as being for the protection of life and property, of respect for ordinary law, and so on. All those methods proved an ugly failure.

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 should like to have been there if only to have got up and said, “If Mr. G.'s Home Rule Bill had been passed 30 years ago could Ireland have been worse than it is now? Would it not have been better?” And then fallen dead like Lord Chatham.

Ireland and Russia are the two most ‘Christian’ countries in Europe. To-day they are the most disfigured by violence and outrage. What do you make of that?

I don't like that hateful heresy, proportional representation.

Excess of severity is not the path to order. On the contrary, it is the path to the bomb.

Success depends on three things: who says it, what he says, how he says it; and of these three things, what he says is the least important.

In my creed, waste of public money is like the sin against the Holy Ghost.

The proper memory for a politician is one that knows what to remember and what to forget.

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

As for progress, what signs of it are there now? And all we Victorians believed in it from the Utilitarians onwards.

Liberalism, as we have known it, is dead beyond resurrection.

I have not read it, and I don't intend to read it. It's not worth the paper it's written on. To the end of time it'll always be a case of “Thy head or my head.” I've no faith in these schemes.