Top 15 Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury Quotes

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

Opinions upon moral questions are more often the expression of strongly felt expediency than of careful ethical reasoning; and the opinions so formed by one generation become the conscientious convictions or the sacred instincts of the next.

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 very sad, but I'm afraid America is bound to forge ahead and nothing can restore the equality between us. If we had interfered in the Confederate War it was then possible for us to reduce the power of the United States to manageable proportions. But two such chances are not given to a nation in the course of its career.

England is, I believe, the only country in which during a great war eminent men write and speak publicly as if they belonged to the enemy.

It is true that there had been spread about in the world the impression that we should never fight again, and that every adversary had only to press hardly and boldly upon us to be certain that we should yield. It was a gross miscalculation on their part. (Cheers.) I have no doubt that the converse is true, and now that we have shown what powers we can exercise, what qualities we can display, how really we can copy the brilliant example of those who have gone before us, that the power of England is not only illustrated by the example, but that it is safe—that the cause of peace is now more secure than it was before the strength of England was conclusively shown. (Cheers.)

I have said for years that I always thought that when I knew what the Queen thought I knew pretty certainly what view her subjects would take, and especially the middle classes of her subjects.

He entirely shares your Majesty's burning indignation at the gross and monstrous injustice which has been perpetrated in France. It is perfectly horrible; and gives the impression that truth and justice are no longer regarded as of any serious importance in France. It is difficult to understand how any country can conduct either civil or military Government in such a deplorable condition of the public mind.

It was stated as clearly as possible in that protocol, and was evidently the object of the action of the two Powers at the time, that an era of friendly co-operation should be introduced, in which both races should have, under the conduct of both Governments, the utmost equality it was possible to confer on them. That was the guiding principle of the Government in 1881. I do not affect to sympathise with the view they took. ... I did not support it at the time; on the contrary, I resisted it to the utmost of my power. I thought it was a policy tainted with the fault, which is a virtue in many men's eyes, but in my eyes is almost the most dangerous fault a policy can have—it was an optimistic policy. It was an undue belief in the effect of amiable acts not supported by requisite strength.

You may roughly divide the nations of the world as the living and the dying. On the one side you have great countries of enormous power growing in power every year, growing in wealth, growing in dominion, growing in the perfection of their organization. Railways have given to them the power to concentrate upon any one point the whole military force of their population and to assemble armies of a magnitude and power never dreamt of in the generations that have gone by. Science has placed in the hands of those armies weapons ever growing in their efficacy of destruction, and, therefore, adding to the power—fearfully to the power—of those who have the opportunity of using them. ... [T]he weak States are becoming weaker and the strong States are becoming stronger. It needs no specialty of prophecy to point out to you what the inevitable result of that combined process must be. ... [T]he living nations will gradually encroach on the territory of the dying, and the seeds and causes of conflict amongst civilized nations will speedily appear.

I have a strong belief that there is a danger of the public opinion of this country undergoing a reaction from the Cobdenic doctrines of 30 or 40 years ago, and believing that it is our duty to take everything we can, to fight everybody, and to make a quarrel of every dispute. That seems to me a very dangerous doctrine, not merely because it might incite other nations against us—though that is not a consideration to be neglected, for the kind of reputation we are at present enjoying on the Continent of Europe is by no means pleasant, and by no means advantageous; but there is a much more serious danger, and that is lest we should overtax our strength. However strong you may be, whether you are a man or a nation, there is a point beyond which your strength will not go. It is madness; it ends in ruin if you allow yourselves to pass beyond it.

You must remember what the concert of Europe is. The concert, or, as I prefer to call it, the inchoate federation of Europe, is a body which acts only when it is unanimous...remember this—that this federation of Europe is the embryo of the only possible structure of Europe which can save civilization from the desolating effects of a disastrous war. (Cheers.) You notice that on all sides the instruments of destruction, the piling up of arms, are becoming larger and larger. The powers of concentration are becoming greater, the instruments of death more active and more numerous, and are improved with every year; and each nation is bound, for its own safety's sake, to take part in this competition. These are the things which are done, so to speak, on the side of war. The one hope that we have to prevent this competition from ending in a terrible effort of mutual destruction which will be fatal to Christian civilization—the one hope we have is that the Powers may gradually be brought together, to act together in a friendly spirit on all questions of difference which may arise, until at last they shall be welded in some international constitution which shall give to the world, as a result of their great strength, a long spell of unfettered and prosperous trade and continued peace.

I feel it is our duty to sustain the federated action of Europe. I think it has suffered by the somewhat absurd name which has been given to it—the Concert of Europe—and the intense importance of the fact has been buried under the bad jokes to which the word has given rise. But the federated action of Europe—if we can maintain it, if we can maintain this Legislature—is our sole hope of escaping from the constant terror and the calamity of war, the constant pressure of the burdens of an armed peace which weigh down the spirits and darken the prospects of every nation in this part of the world. ["Hear, hear!"] The federation of Europe is the only hope we have; but that federation is only to be maintained by observing the conditions on which every Legislature must depend, on which every judicial system must be based—the engagements into which it enters must be respected.

I say that we put all our money upon the wrong horse. ... My own conviction is strong that, unless some very essential reforms in the conduct of the government are adopted, the doom of the Turkish Empire cannot be very long postponed.

[Y]ou must remember that these people, these Turks, are of the race of Genghiz and Tamerlane, that they belong to a religion, of which I would not say a word of disrespect, which has produced high civilisation and morality, but is capable of the most atrocious perversion and corruption of any religion on the face of the globe; and being Mahomedans and being Turks, with their fanaticism thoroughly aroused, they perpetrated these horrors at which Christendom has grown pale.