I won’t be coaxed round as if I was a baby or a puppy. If I can’t have kindness, I’ll have independence.

and I wont be coaxed round as if I was a baby or a puppy. If I cant have kindness, I’ll have independence.

...what would be most extraordinary is this, that anybody who considered the state of the Liberal party then and now should expect me voluntarily to return to the Liberal party. (Laughter.) I left the Liberal party because I found it impossible to lead it, in the main owing to the divisions to which I referred in my letter. (Hear, hear.) The Liberal party in that respect is no better now, but rather worse; and it would indeed be an extraordinary evolution of mind if, after having left the Liberal party on that ground, I were to announce my intention of voluntarily returning to it in its present condition. No, gentlemen, so far as I am concerned, I must repeat what I have said on that subject in all my speeches, that for the present, at any rate, I must proceed alone. I must plough my furrow alone.

My position then, Sir, in regard to the Liberal party is in all points the opposite of Earl Russell's. ... I have none of the claims he possesses. I came among you an outcast from those with whom I associated, driven from them, I admit, by no arbitrary act, but by the slow and resistless forces of conviction. I came among you, to make use of the legal phraseology, in pauperis forma. I had nothing to offer you but faithful and honourable service. ... You received me with kindness, indulgence, generosity, and I may even say with some measure of confidence. And the relation between us has assumed such a form that you never can be my debtors, but that I must for ever be in your debt.

Sometimes kindness is stepping aside, letting go of our need to be right & just being happy for someone.

No. A Liberal I was born and a Liberal I die. I will not join Labour.

I've learned... . That being kind is more important than being right.

I would rather go out of politics having the feeling that I had done what was right than stay in with the approval of all men, knowing in my heart that I have acted as I ought not to.

Life's beauty: the kindest act toward you in your life may come from an outsider not interested in reciprocation.

I was the last to consent to the separation; but the separation having been made and having become inevitable, I have always said, as I say now, that I would be the first to meet the friendship of the United States as an independent power.

There is nothing I congratulate myself on more heartily than on never having joined a sect.

I break away from all conventions that do not lead to my earthly success and happiness.

I myself have not met a self-confessed liberal since the late fifties (and even then it was a tacky thing to admit, like coming from the middle class or the Middle West, those two gloomy seedbeds of talent), yet hardly a day passes that I don't read another attack on the "typical liberal" — as it might be announcing a pest of dinosaurs or a plague of unicorns.

Today I bent the truth to be kind, and I have no regret, for I am far surer of what is kind than I am of what is true.