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The key to a nation's future is in her past. A nation that loses it has no future. For men's deepest desires—the instrument by which a continuing soc… - Arthur Bryant
" "The key to a nation's future is in her past. A nation that loses it has no future. For men's deepest desires—the instrument by which a continuing society moulds its destiny—spring from their own inherited experience. We cannot recreate the past, but we cannot escape it. It is in our blood and bone. To understand the temperament of a people, a statesman has first to know its history.
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About Arthur Bryant
Sir Arthur Wynne Morgan Bryant CH CBE (18 February 1899 – 22 January 1985) was an English historian, columnist for The Illustrated London News and man of affairs. His books included studies of Samuel Pepys, accounts of English eighteenth- and nineteenth-century history, and a life of George V. Whilst his scholarly reputation has declined somewhat since his death, he continues to be read and to be the subject of detailed historical studies. He moved in high government circles, where his works were influential, being the favourite historian of three prime ministers: Winston Churchill, Clement Attlee, and Harold Wilson.
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Sir Arthur Wynne Morgan Bryant
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Additional quotes by Arthur Bryant
Loving private liberty, yet finding that it could not exist without public order, the English devoted themselves to making the two compatible. Freedom within a framework of discipline became their ideal. They achieved it through the sovereignty of the law. "All our struggles for liberty," wrote Disraeli, "smack of law." And by law the English meant an enforceable compact between themselves and their rulers, deriving not from unilaterally imposed force, but from assent freely given. Both they and their American descendants constituted such law, rather than the Executive, their ultimate sovereign.
Compromise, give-and-take, live-and-let-live, became a national habit. The freedom of the Press—a forebearance unnatural in any Government—was an English invention; so was the secret ballot which enabled a man to record an unpopular vote without danger to himself. The English, as self-opinionated as any people, mastered the lesson that they could only possess liberty by allowing it to others, enjoy the propagation of their own views by listening patiently to their neighbours'.
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[T]here is one fundamental issue at stake in Thursday's Referendum. It is whether the British people of the future are to retain the age-long right through Parliament and parliamentary elections to decide their destiny without being bound by the authoritarian and dead hand of the past imposed by some rigid bureaucratic formula devised by continental constitutionists. What is at stake is the preservation of the great libertarian principle of popular "consultation and consent" which has run like a golden thread through our history. The essence of our unwritten constitution has always been that, while the elected Parliament of the day, interpreting the will of the existing electoral majority, can enact whatever it chooses, it cannot prevent future Parliaments and electorates from exercising the same elastic right.
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