Quintin Hogg, Baron Hailsham of St Marylebone Quotes

I have never believed in peace at any price.

If the British public falls for this, I think it would be stark, staring bonkers.

Moderation is the hallmark of our country and the burden of our Conservative faith. ... [I]n an age of violence the Conservative watchwords must be law, justice, moderation and humanity.

It is an excellent thing that Mr Powell has joined the Ulster Unionists. They have found a new leader to desert, and he a fresh cause to betray.

[The Labour Party's leadership is] dominated by rather rootless intellectuals or obviously bourgeois eccentrics like Mr Michael Foot and Mr Wedgwood Benn.

Experience shows that at this rate of inflation, democracy cannot survive... A middle-class backlash is inevitable. A populist movement. In the end people will not put up with the law being broken and factions of the workers getting away with it with impunity. People will take control into their own hands, or a strong government will use the public forces to seize control. People will get hurt. Quite likely there will be a lot of violence one way or another. But in the end there is a limit to what middle-class people will tolerate.

What is urgently needed is some limitation on this nominally elected dictatorship. It is here that I join hands with the conventional Bill of Rights enthusiasts, of whom...I am not one.

On the debate on the occupation of the Ruhr (Hansard, 13th–15th February 1923) the whole Left attacked France as "militaristic", "obsessed by fears which are largely the result of its own reactionary policy", "immoral", and aimed "at the complete destruction of Germany". The diehards did not take the same view. Lt.-Col. Croft (Bournemouth) (now Lord Croft): "I think Germany has shown pretty clearly that she is not going to do more than she can [help]. She is going to try and convince us that she cannot do anything like as much as we ask." Sir F. Banbury (whose pride was that he had only once voted for an Act of Parliament in his life): "I believe that if the Germans were given time to recover they would use that time in order again to commence a European war." Mr. Remer: "Our past policy has encouraged Germany to make defaults."
I mention these views, not because they are my own; they are not. But they are a great deal nearer truth than the stuff the Left was talking at this time.

If you can tell me there are no adulterers on the front bench of the Labour Party you can talk to me about Profumo.

It is not a point of which I am much ashamed. Having grown up in the 1930s, I have a hatred of unemployment. The reason why we over-reacted, if over-reacted we did, was because we hoped that, if it could be shown that we were doing our best to deal with avoidable unemployment, the unions would voluntarily restrain their demands and prevent suffering in the community. The truth is that Mr Powell is so intent for personal reasons on ruining Mr Heath that no attack, however violent, however irrational, or however evilly intentioned, is beyond him in his present frame of mind.

A great party is not to be brought down because of a scandal by a woman of easy virtue and a proved liar.

Conservatives do not believe that political struggle is the most important thing in life... The simplest among them prefer fox-hunting—the wisest religion.

[W]e have always been determined to prevent a combination of forces hostile to ourselves and to separate such a combination when it has arisen; we have always resisted the domination of Europe by a single power, since such domination would cause us to live in a state of armed peace in order to prevent a sudden descent on our shores.

To our refusal to accept the French view of German duplicity and to our failure to regard the peace treaties as binding, many of our present troubles are due.

The truth which the Left would not face—and will not face, even now—is that from 1932 and probably from 1929 collective security was moribund, owing to the re-emergence of a Germany determined to destroy it, and the existence of a Japan which had never really believed in it. It could only rise from the dead by the development of a system of armaments in the hands of the peace-loving nations capable of defeating and destroying the governments in the aggressor countries. The only future of the League lay through rearmament, and not through opposition to it.