Lord Hailsham Quotes

The introduction of religious passion into politics is the end of honest politics, and the introduction of politics into religion is the prostitution of true religion.

I regard freedom of expression as the primary right without which one can not have a proper functioning democracy.

The best way I know of to win an argument is to start by being in the right.

The moment politics becomes dull, democracy is in danger.

Mercy is not what every criminal is entitled to. What he is entitled to is justice.

Abuse is the very hallmark of liberty.

Political liberty is nothing else but the diffusion of power.

If dictatorship is the concentration of power, freedom consists in its diffusion.

You ought not to be ashamed of being bored. What you ought to be ashamed of is being boring.

We are in the presence of a recruiting drive systematically and deliberately undertaken by American business, by American universities, and to a lesser extent, American government, often initiated by talent scouts specially sent over here to buy British brains and preempt them for service of the U.S.A. ... I look forward earnestly to the day when some reform of the American system of school education enables them to produce their own scientists so that, in an aimiable free trade of talent, there may be adequate interchange between our country and theirs, and not a one-way traffic.

A reasonable doubt is nothing more than a doubt for which reasons can be given. The fact that 1 or 2 men out of 12 differ from the others does not establish that their doubts are reasonable.

A politician who enters public life may as well face the fact that the best way of not being found out is not to do anything which, if found out, will cause his ruin.