William Ewart Gladstone Quotes

What that Sicilian mule was to me, I have been to the Queen.

We are part of the community of Europe, and we must do our duty as such.

England’s foreign policy should always be inspired by the love of freedom. 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 one lays the firmest foundations both of loyalty and order.

One cannot fight against the future. Time is on our side.

It is upon those who say that it is necessary to exclude forty-nine fiftieths of the working classes [from the vote] to show cause, and I venture to say that every man who is not presumably incapacitated by some consideration of personal unfitness or of political danger, is morally entitled to come within the pale of the Constitution.

Selfishness is the greatest curse of the human race.

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

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

You cannot fight against the future. Time is on our side.

Nothing that is morally wrong can be politically right.

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.

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

It is not a life at all. It is a reticence, in three volumes.

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

No man ever became great or good except through many and great mistakes.

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.

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

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.