some quotes from Lord Salisbury

Some quotes from Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, British Prime Minister for a total of thirteen years between 1885 and 1902.

“Parliament is a potent engine, and its enactments must always do something, but they very seldom do what the originators of these enactments meant.”

“In men of genius, as a rule, the imagination or the passions are too strongly developed to suffer them to reach the highest standard of practical statesmanship. They follow some poetical ideal, they are under the spell of some fascinating chapter of past history, they are the slaves of some talismanic phrase which their generation has taken up, or they have made for themselves a system to which all men and all systems must be bent….. When great men get drunk with a theory it is the little men who have the headache.”

On democracy: “Wherever it has had free play in the ancient world or in the modern, in the old hemisphere or the new, a thirst for empire, and a readiness for aggressive war, has always marked it.”

“English policy is to float lazily downstream, occasionally putting out a diplomatic boat-hook to avoid collisions.”

“Whatever happens will be for the worse, and therefore it is in our interest that as little should happen as possible.”