John Morley

My only consolation has been to read up the history of Ireland in Lecky and our abominable treatment of her. All the faults of the Irish character are traceable to that.

Montagu calls himself my disciple. I see very little of my teaching in him. This dyarchy won't work. As for his strange plea for rousing the masses of India out of their “pathetic content” by reforms for which they do not ask, and which …

I should like to have been there if only to have got up and said, “If Mr. G.'s Home Rule Bill had been passed 30 years ago could Ireland have been worse than it is now? Would it not have been better?” And then fallen dead like Lord Chatham.

Ireland and Russia are the two most ‘Christian’ countries in Europe. To-day they are the most disfigured by violence and outrage. What do you make of that?

I don't like that hateful heresy, proportional representation.

Excess of severity is not the path to order. On the contrary, it is the path to the bomb.

Success depends on three things: who says it, what he says, how he says it; and of these three things, what he says is the least important.

In my creed, waste of public money is like the sin against the Holy Ghost.

The proper memory for a politician is one that knows what to remember and what to forget.

There are some books which cannot be adequately reviewed for twenty or thirty years after they come out.

As for progress, what signs of it are there now? And all we Victorians believed in it from the Utilitarians onwards.

Liberalism, as we have known it, is dead beyond resurrection.

I have not read it, and I don't intend to read it. It's not worth the paper it's written on. To the end of time it'll always be a case of “Thy head or my head.” I've no faith in these schemes.

A mirage, and an old one... One may as well talk of London morality being due to the Archbishop of Canterbury. But take away Scotland Yard!

I'm sick of Wilson ... He hailed the Russian Revolution six months ago as the new Golden Age, and I said to Page, “What does he know of Russia?” to which Page replied, “Nothing.” As for his talk about a union of hearts after the war, the …

Censorship...ought to be confined to the temporary suppression of military and naval news which might assist the enemy... Public opinion might be fallible, but it was not half as fallible as individual opinion, and, good or bad, the …

I was always opposed to the Anglo-Russian agreement—so was Kitchener. Who stands most to gain out of this war? Russia. Who is the real aggressor? Russia. At the end of it we shall have her on our backs. What do you imagine will be the …

The decrepitude that ended in the Latin conquest of Constantinople at the beginning of the thirteenth century, and the Mahometan conquest in the middle of the fifteenth, is an awkward reproof to the optimist superstition that civilized …

I am a theorist, but I detest the introduction of abstract principles into the great practical difficulties of this nation.

I am, and always have been, a pretty strong individualist.

[I] always had a soft place in my heart for the patrician Whigs.

Define it as we may, faith in Progress has been the mainspring of Liberalism in all its schools and branches.

I submit that it is an Agreement that this country may not only be contented with, but proud of.

I have often thought that Strafford was an ideal type, both for governor of Ireland in the 17th century, and governor of India in the 20th century.