Stanley Baldwin Quotes

I always dreaded Roosevelt's experiments and I think there will be an appalling mess up in America in a few months.

The fellows I am most up against are the old gentlemen in the extreme Tory wing who sit in the smoking rooms of clubs and never do a hand's turn of work, but damn me for all I do... No country had the same stock to draw on for public works as we had. Public life could become beastly corrupt, but we could all help to keep it clean and free from graft.

I think it is well also for the man in the street to realise that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through.

I need not emphasise the extent to which the Government have not only talked of disarmament, but have put it into practice. The time has now come to an end when Great Britain can proceed with unilateral disarmament.

Had they ever thought of the parallel in the origins of Mohammedanism and Bolshevism—both springing out of Christianity, one proclaiming brotherhood and the other communism, but both proclaiming death and damnation upon all unbelievers. Within a century of the death of the prophet the Mohammedans had spread from Arabia to the Pyrenees by means of the sword and were stopped by Charles Martel at Tours. Russia throws up few great men but imagine what might happen if a Bolsehvik Peter the Great appeared on the scene.

With Russia and America out of the League sanctions are a mistake. I've always thought so. You can't enforce them against a first-class power. The very people like Bob Cecil who have made us disarm, and quite right too, are now urging us forward to take action. But where will action lead us to? If we withdraw Ambassadors that's only the first step. What's the next? and the next? If you have economic boycott you'll have war declared by Japan and she will seize Singapore and Hongkong and we can't, as we are placed, stop her. You'll get nothing out of Washington but words, big words, but only words.

Rightly or wrongly we have done with the old India; there's a new one afoot and we must make the best of it.

We shall put the tariff through and if it does well it will drop out of party politics very much like Free Trade did. Then leave suitable time to change the title of our Party to National, as there will be little which really divides us from the great bulk of the Liberals.

I was anxious two years ago as to the line which our party would take on the Indian question. I believed that the one course was the only one for a progressive party—and a party must be progressive to live. I believed that the other course led to the destruction of the party.

Now this country of ours has a record of which we may well be proud. When we signed the various treaties pledging ourselves to tackle that question of disarmament in sincerity, in earnest, and in honour, we justified and backed our signature, and we have done all that one country by itself can do. We have reduced all our armaments. We occupy the fifth place in the world to-day in the strength of our Air Force. We have cut our Army to the bone, and we have engaged in treaties for the limitation of our Navy, and nothing more can be done by way of unilateral disarmament.

Do not let us imagine that discoveries in the world of the higher mathematics, of physics or biology are going to remove or even reduce our difficulties on the moral plane...The realm of morals is a world neither of quantity nor of chemical action. It is a world of values. It is precisely these values of right and wrong, of good and evil, of honesty and courage, which matter supremely for religion and national life...I am not despising science. I am only suggesting that moral values, eternal in their quality, transient in their form and application, are the foundation of a country's greatness. If moral values flourish in our common life all will be well with the nation.

To elevate every desire, however obscene, into a good because it is desired may be the way of all flesh, but it is not the way of the Cross. And the moral anarchy which is said to pervade our youth...is not going to be countered by lowering the demands of religion, but by insisting on them. The notion that to enlist the support and enthusiasm of youth it is necessary to condone their vices is entirely to misjudge them, and to forfeit their respect. The churches are much more likely to fail in the long run because they demand too little than because they demand too much of human nature. The real tragedy of the position in which the young find themselves to-day arises from the collapse of the orthodoxy of past generations, and the failure to replace it by a confident coherent faith applicable to the conditions of to-day. Principles may be eternal, but their embodiment must be temporal.

What matters is that religion should sway our motives, sustain our principles, surround and bathe our spirits like a secret atmosphere as we go about our work...Religion, as we are all agreed, is not merely an affair of Christians in churches; it is an affair of Christians in politics, in diplomacy, in trade, in industry, in school, in sport. I think the popular judgment has accepted that as axiomatic.

The time has come for us to look after ourselves, and as the foreigner protects himself, so we must put the interests of our own people first. We will ask the country also to enter into trade agreements with our own dominions, under which we will ask them to buy our own manufactured goods, we taking in exchange foodstuffs and raw materials. ... We will ask the electorate to give us powers to stimulate wheat-growing.

What the proprietorship of these papers is aiming at is power, and power without responsibility — the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.