Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Now, a few words from Mr. Gladstone......

















William Ewart Gladstone (1809-1898) was a scholar, author, orator, economist, free-trade advocate, and a first rate politician.  Over a sixty year career, he served as as Britain's Chancellor or the Exchequer four times and as Prime Minister an unequaled four separate times.  To quote Joseph Schumpeter,  "there was one man who not only united high ability with unparalleled opportunity but also knew how to turn budgets into political triumphs and who stands in history as the greatest English financier of economic liberalism, Gladstone..".   You can read more about him here.  A few of his quotes are here:

I am certain, from experience, of the immense advantage of strict account-keeping in early life. It is just like learning the grammar then, which when once learned need not be referred to afterwards.

Books are delightful society. If you go into a room and find it full of books - even without taking them from the shelves they seem to speak to you, to bid you welcome. 

Men are apt to mistake the strength of their feeling for the strength of their argument. The heated mind resents the chill touch and relentless scrutiny of logic.

As the British Constitution is the most subtile organism which has proceeded from the womb and the long gestation of progressive history, so the American Constitution is, so far as I can see, the most wonderful work ever struck off by the brain and purpose of man.

Nothing that is morally wrong can be politically right.

National injustice is the surest road to national downfall.

It is the duty of government to make it difficult for people to do wrong, easy to do right.

The disease of an evil conscience is beyond the practice of all the physicians of all the countries in the world.

A rational reaction against the irrational excesses and vagaries of scepticism may, I admit, readily degenerate into the rival folly of credulity.   To be engaged in opposing wrong affords, under the conditions of our mental constitution, but a slender guarantee for being right.

Here is my first principle of foreign policy: good government at home.

We look forward to the time when the Power of Love will replace the Love of Power. Then will our world know the blessings of peace.

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