Stanley Baldwin quotes - page 6
The continent of Europe, a continent separated from us indeed by a narrow strip of ocean, but joined to us by a hundred links of commerce and of humanity, indissolubly bound up with our fate, whether we like it or not. ... until you have stability you can have no confidence, and until you have confidence you can never get that increased productive power which is one of the absolute necessities for the bettering of our own trade in England...It is that cursed and diabolic suspicion between man and man and nation and nation that robs Europe of that sense of security that is essential to the unity of spirit which we must have before the world can function aright.
Stanley Baldwin
To many the last five years have been a disenchantment. Every cloud has a silver lining, and we take strength from the fact that, through all the difficulties of the time, the strength and moderation of the character of our people has once again shown itself, and in our country, almost alone in Europe, have we had freedom from unconstitutional rebellion. And more than that, I think we may say of our own people that feelings of hatred and vengeance have no permanent root in their hearts.
Stanley Baldwin
We desire to go on working to maintain world peace, and to strengthen the League of Nations, and I give you my word – and I think you can trust me by now – our defence programme will be no more than is sufficient to make our country safe and enable us to fulfil our obligations. That much we must have.
Stanley Baldwin
The whole world has its eye to day on London. The whole world is represented in London, and they are all coming here to be with us in what, to the vast majority of our people, will be a period of rejoicing for many days, culminating in that age-long service in the Abbey a week to-day. In the Abbey on this day week our young King and his Queen, who were called suddenly and unexpectedly to the most tremendous position on earth, will kneel and dedicate themselves to the service of their people, a service which can only be ended by death. I appeal to that handful of men with whom rests peace or war to give the best present to the country that could be given at that moment, to do the one thing which would rejoice the hearts of all the people who love this country, that is, to rend and dissipate this dark cloud which has gathered over us, and show the people of the world that this democracy can still at least practise the arts of peace in a world of strife.
Stanley Baldwin
I think that throughout this country there is to-day a far greater desire than there has ever been before to hear plain, unadorned statements of cases...Let us always remember this: when we come to big things we do not need rhetoric. Truth, we have always been told, is naked. She requires very little clothing. After all, St. Paul was no orator, and yet his speeches and his teachings seem to have spread and to have lasted a long time. I cannot help feeling that if we were to go back two thousand years I would back St. Paul and the results of his teaching against all the rhetoric of a Sunday paper or of the leading orators of the age.
Stanley Baldwin
Our people are not going to throw over Parliament to set up divine right either of the capitalist or of the trade unionist, and we are not going to bow down to a dictatorship of either...I want to see our British Labour movement free from alien and foreign heresy. I want to see it pursued and developed on English lines, led by English men.
Stanley Baldwin
The greatest hope I have for our country is in the widespread kindling of that real desire for education which I regard as almost the only fruit of the war on which I can look with satisfaction...we are apt to lose sight of the importance of education as an end in itself. If you regard education solely from the point of view of enabling you to earn a salary, useful as that may be, you miss one of the best things for which education stands.
Stanley Baldwin
Wesley was a great Englishman, first and last...if any one single man stood between England and the monstrous upheavals on the Continent, it was John Wesley...He was typically English: the best native qualities of the Englishman were in him, and were raised to such an extraordinary pitch that they became genius...Historians of that century who filled their pages with Napoleon and had nothing to say of John Wesley now realise that they cannot explain the nineteenth-century England until they can explain Wesley. And I believe it is true to say that you cannot understand twentieth-century America unless you can understand Wesley.
Stanley Baldwin
Lately some picked graduates from Canada are beginning to play their part in looking after those parts of the Empire where the white man goes out, often alone, to teach, to educate and to bring along the more backward races of Empire. There is no more self-sacrificing work, there is no finer work, and you see Canadians to-day in the Sudan, Malaya, Mauritius, and in the colonial service generally-medical men, highly educated men in the Civil Service, helping to bear the white man's burden. I am old-fashioned enough to believe that it is not enough for a country to concentrate solely on making a lot of money for itself; that a real spiritual force comes into it when its sons are ready, as for generations Englishmen, Irishmen and Scotsmen have been ready, to give up the comforts and ease of home life and go out on that pioneer work to bring forward those backward parts of the world and try to help them to benefit from the things that have profited us to much in the years past.
Stanley Baldwin
I attended the Royal Opening of the Indian Conference yesterday...Our delegation is starting well, but Winston [Churchill] is in the depths of gloom. He wants the Conference to bust up quickly and the Tory Party to go back to pre-war and govern with a strong hand. He has become once more the subaltern of Hussars of '96.
Stanley Baldwin
Difficult as the course is, the dangers do not come from the difficulties; they come from extremists in India and at home. I will tell you what I mean. I am firmly convinced that such writings as appear in such papers as the Daily Mail will do more to lose India for the British Empire, will do more to cause a revolutionary spirit, than anything that can be done in any way by anyone else. I got many letters, I need hardly say, of all points of view. I had a very characteristic one last week... It was from a colonel; he was an old man, you could tell that by his writing; and he used this phrase: He said, "You and Lord Irwin are negrophiles." Perhaps he was a member of the United Empire party. That is not the way to cement the Empire. This sort of thing, and the spirit behind it, will break up our Empire infallibly, and that is what I am out to fight.
Stanley Baldwin
The time has come for us to look after ourselves, and as the foreigner protects himself, so we must put the interests of our own people first. We will ask the country also to enter into trade agreements with our own dominions, under which we will ask them to buy our own manufactured goods, we taking in exchange foodstuffs and raw materials. ... We will ask the electorate to give us powers to stimulate wheat-growing.
Stanley Baldwin
Then, above all, the English people have a curious sense of humour, rather than wit. Humour comes from the heart; wit comes from the brain. We can laugh at ourselves. Do you remember what Ruskin said? "The English laugh is the purest and truest in the metals that can be minted," and indeed, only Heaven can know what the country owes to it. Well, laughter is one of the best things that God has given us, and with hearty laughter neither malice nor indecency can exist. And of all men who have shown us what that laughter can mean, none was like Dickens, every one of whose characters is English to the marrow; and if I might mention a living writer, I think the truest Englishmen are found in Mr. Priestley's novels.
Stanley Baldwin
I say that such qualities were never more needed in the word. Let us hold on to what we are; let us not try to be like anybody else...With our pertinacity, our love of freedom, our love of ordered freedom, our respect for law, our respect for the individual and our power of combining in service; indeed, in our strength and in our weakness, I believe, from my heart, that our people are fitted to pass through whatever trials may be before us, and to emerge-if they are true to their own best traditions-a greater people in the future than they have been in the past.
Stanley Baldwin
No matter what a man's conversation may be on the platform or what air of cynicism he may assume as his shield in daily life, yet underneath that surface, in ninety-nine Englishmen out of one hundred, there will be a love, which he sometimes cannot and sometimes will not explain, for the home in which either he at one time has lived or his parents or grandparents have lived before him.
Stanley Baldwin
I cannot rival L[loyd] G[eorge] at that sort of speech-full of clever thrusts, innuendos, malicious half-truths. To L[loyd] G[eorge] and Winston [Churchill] it is all part of a game; as for me, I cannot make speeches which are sheer and mere dialectic...If I had made the sort of speech about L[loyd] G[eorge] that I could have made it would be a cruel attack on an old man and it would have done no good. All through his career, except during the War, he has done no end of harm, and his Versailles peace was iniquitous and his conduct after the peace execrable.
Stanley Baldwin