Arthur Balfour

Logic always seems to be telling us, in language quite unnecessarily technical, what we understood much better before it was explained.

Men's wishes are not always vain, nor is every life too brief to satisfy its possessor. Only when we attempt, from the point of view permitted by physics and biology, to sum up the possibilities of collective human endeavour, do we fully …

There is always something about our feeling for beautiful things which can neither be described nor communicated, which is unshared and unshareable.

Here we have values which by supposition we are reluctant to lose. Neither scientific observation nor sober sense can preserve them. It is surely permissible to ask what will.

We now know too much about matter to be materialists. The very essence of the physical order of things is that it creates nothing new. Change is never more than a redistribution of that which never changes. But sensibility belongs to the …

Everything that happened, good or bad, would subtract something from the lessening store of useful energy, till a time arrived when nothing could happen any more, and the universe, frozen into eternal repose, would for ever be as if it …

Few persons are prevented from thinking themselves right by the reflection that, if they be right, the rest of the world is wrong.

The Irish had owed their success to crime. Winston practically admitted it. They had defied British rule,—and British rulers had given in to them. How could such a state of things be said to fit in with the scheme of the Empire?

I am 80. I cannot take much more part in public affairs, but I rejoice to think I see growing up younger generations, one by one, who instinctively follow the great example of their forefathers and are predestined with undiminished lustre …

Our whole political machinery presupposes a people so fundamentally at one that they can safely afford to bicker.

I am a Scotsman addressing Scotsmen, and I feel, therefore, peculiarly qualified to speak on this subject. I absolutely refuse to allow any man, be he English or be he Scottish, to rob me of my share in Magna Charta, or Shakespeare, …

Biography should be written by an acute enemy.

The General Strike has taught the working classes more in four days than years of talking could have done.

Most terrible of all the terrible Turks.

Fairly well, but it is like talking to a lot of tombstones.

I should fear that the new Poland would suffer from the diseases through which the old Poland perished; that it would be a theatre of perpetual intrigues between Germany and Russia; and that its existence, so far from promoting the cause …

Whether an independent Bohemia would be strong enough to hold her own, from a military as well as from a commercial point of view, against Teutonic domination—surrounded as she is at present entirely by German influence—I do not know.

The Government have tyrannically destroyed, so far as the Parliament Bill is concerned, every real power which the Second Chamber possesses. They have in their own fashion imitated Cromwell, without either his excuses or his genius.

I cannot become another Sir Robert Peel in my Party.

It is necessary for us as a nation not merely to be organized for war but to be organized for peace, not only to be an armed nation while other nations are armed but to have our industry, our productive capacity organized while other …

...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 sufferance unless our Navy be supreme …

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

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 communities, those new commonwealths beyond …

[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 will go down into the pit and all his …