Quotes by Arthur Balfour

“It is unfortunate, considering that enthusiasm moves the world, that so few enthusiasts can be trusted to speak the truth.”

“I never forgive, but I always forget.”

“He has only half learned the art of reading who has not added to it the even more refined accomplishments of skipping and skimming.”

“Winston has written four volumes about himself and called it 'World Crisis'.”

“Society dead or alive can have no charm without intimacy and no intimacy without an interest in trifles.”

“Enthusiasm moves the world.”

“Society dead or alive can have no charm without intimacy and no intimacy without an interest in trifles.”

“To secure order, freedom, and safety, for the minority as well as for the majority of the Irish people, and to do so as far as possible, by the administration of equal laws, should be the first obj...”

“I shall offer uncompromising resistance to any measure which may throw obstacles in the way of the teaching of religion in elementary schools. I will not consent in the name of religious freedom, t...”

“Cromwell failed because he relied solely upon repressive measures. That mistake I shall not imitate. I shall be as relentless as Cromwell in enforcing obedience to the law, but, at the same time, I...”

“There are those who talk as if Irishmen were justified in disobeying the law because the law comes to them in a foreign garb. I see no reason why any local colour should be given to the Ten Command...”

“I have never had to go back beyond the year 1885 to prove that the Irish leaders desired to obtain what they call the freedom of their country by illegal and anarchic means.”

“Those who look forward to a period of continuous and, so to speak, inevitable progress, are bound to assign some more solid reason for their convictions than a merely empirical survey of the surfac...”

“[T]he energies of our system will decay, the glory of the sun will be dimmed, and the earth, tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate the race which has for a moment disturbed its solitude. Man ...”

“[I]t is Authority rather than Reason to which, in the main, we owe, not religion only, but ethics and politics; that it is Authority which supplies us with essential elements in the premises of sci...”

“In my judgment, the importance of the Crown in our Constitution is not a diminishing, but an increasing factor. It increases, and must increase with the development of those free, self-governing co...”

“...the existing educational system of this country is chaotic, is ineffectual, is utterly behind the age, makes us the laughing-stock of every advanced nation in Europe and America, puts us behind ...”

“...the great Unionist party shall still control, whether in power or whether in opposition, the destinies of this great Empire.”

“I hold that fiscal reform is, and must remain, the first constructive work of the Unionist party; That the objects of such reform are to secure more equal terms of competition for British trade and...”

“...we are now in a position which we have not been within the memory of living men. (Shame.) Now, what does this imply? Everything depends upon the Navy. (Hear, hear.) We exist as an Empire only on...”