William E. Gladstone Quotes

Be happy with what you have and are, be generous with both, and you won't have to hunt for happiness.

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.

Show me the manner in which a nation or a community cares for its dead and I will measure with mathematical exactness the tender sympathies of its people, their respect for the laws of the land and their loyalty to high ideals.

Liberalism is trust of the people tempered by prudence. Conservatism is distrust of the people tempered by fear.

No one ever became great except through many and great mistakes.

Be inspired with the belief that life is a great and noble calling; not a mean and groveling thing that we are to shuffle through as we can, but an elevated and lofty destiny.

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.

Nothing that is morally wrong can be politically right.

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.

I have known ninety-five of the world's great men in my time, and of these eighty-seven were followers of the Bible.

Justice delayed is justice denied.

National injustice is the surest road to national downfall.

Remember the rights of the savage, as we call him. Remember that the happiness of his humble home, remember that the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan, among the winter snows, is as inviolable in the eye of Almighty God, as can be your own.

If you are cold, tea will warm you; if you are too heated, it will cool you; If you are depressed, it will cheer you; If you are excited, it will calm you.

Never forget that the purpose for which a man lives is the improvement of the man himself, so that he may go out of this world having, in his great sphere or his small one, done some little good for his fellow creatures and labored a little to diminish the sin and sorrow that are in the world.

Selfishness is the greatest curse of the human race.

My only hope for the world is in bringing the human mind into contact with divine revelation.

There is a limit to the work that can be got out of a human body or a human brain, and he is a wise man who wastes no energy on pursuits for which he is not fitted; and he is still wiser who, from among the things that he can do well, chooses and resolut

Be thorough in all you do; and remember that although ignorance often may be innocent, pretension is always despicable.

There should be a sympathy with freedom, a desire to give it scope, founded not upon visionary ideas, but upon the long experience of many generations within the shores of this happy isle, that in freedom you lay the firmest foundations both of loyalty and order.

One example is worth a thousand arguments.

All the world over, I will back the masses against the classes.

As the British Constitution is the most subtle organism which has proceeded from progressive history, so the American Constitution is the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man.

To call a man a characteristically Oxford man is, in my opinion, to give him the highest compliment that could be paid to any human being.

You cannot fight against future. Time is on its side.

Censure and criticism never hurt anybody. If false, they can't hurt you unless you are wanting in manly character; and if true, they show a man his weak points, and forewarn him against failure and trouble.

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

Thrift of time will repay you in after-life with a thousandfold of profit beyond your most sanguine dreams.

I think that the principle of the Conservative Party is jealousy of liberty and of the people, only qualified by fear; but I think the principle of the Liberal Party is trust in the people, only qualified by prudence.

Commerce is the equalizer of the wealth of nations.

A rational reaction against irrational excesses and vagaries of skepticism may * * * readily degenerate into the rival folly of credulity.

The hopelessness of the Turkish Government should make me witness with delight its being swept out of the countries which it tortures. Next to the Ottoman Government nothing can be more deplorable and blameworthy than jealousies between Greek and Slav and plans by the States already existing for appropriating other territory. Why not Macedonia for the Macedonians as well as Bulgaria for the Bulgarians and Serbia for the Serbians?

The errors of former times are recorded for our instruction in order that we may avoid their repition.

Good laws make it easier to do right and harder to do wrong.

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

The American Revolution was a vindication of liberties inherited and possessed. It was a conservative revolution.

All the wonders of the Greek civilization heaped together are less wonderful than the single book of Psalms. Greece had all that this world could give her; but the flowers of Paradise blossomed in Palestine alone.

I am inclined to say that the personal attendance and intervention of women in election proceedings, even apart from any suspicion of the wider objects of many of the promoters of the present movement, would be a practical evil not only of the gravest, but even of an intolerable character.

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

We are bound to lose Ireland in consequence of years of cruelty, stupidity and misgovernment and I would rather lose her as a friend than as a foe.

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.

Mediocrity is now, as formerly, dangerous, commonly fatal, to the poet; but among even the successful writers of prose, those who rise sensibly above it are the very rarest exceptions.

Nothing more surely cultivates and embellishes a man than association with refined and virtuous women.

To be engaged in opposing wrong affords...but a slender guarantee for being right.

The ravages of drink are greater than those of war pestilence and famine combined.

The book must of necessity be put into a bookcase. And the bookcase must be housed. And the house must be kept. And the library must be dusted, must be arranged, must be catalogued. What a vista of toil, yet not unhappy toil!

For works of the mind really great there is no old age, no decrepitude. It is inconceivable that a time should come when Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, should not ring in the ears of civilized man.

Swimming for his life, a man does not see much of the country through which the river winds.

Avarice, where it has full dominion, excludes every other passion.

It is no use for the honorable member to shake his head in the teeth of his own words.