Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury

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Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (3 February 1830 – 22 August 1903) British Conservative politician and Prime Minister.

Sourced

• A gram of experience is worth a ton of theory.
  • Saturday Review (1859)

• No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.

  • Letter to Lord Lytton (15 June 1877)

• By a free country, I mean a country where people are allowed, so long as they do not hurt their neighbors, to do as they like. I do not mean a country where six men may make five men do exactly as they like.
  • Speech to the Kingston and District Working Men's Conservative Association (June 1883)

• On general grounds I object to Parliament trying to regulate private morality in matters which only affects the person who commits the offence.
  • Letter to Sir Henry Peek (1888)

• Parliament is a potent engine, and its enactments must always do something, but they very seldom do what the originators of these enactments meant.
  • Statement to the Associated Chambers of Commerce (March 1891)

• [Most legislation] will have the effect of surrounding the industry which it touches with precautions and investigations, inspections and regulations, in which it will be slowly enveloped and stifled.
  • Statement to the Associated Chambers of Commerce (March 1891)

• If I were asked to define Conservative policy, I should say that it was the upholding of confidence.
  • Quoted in Salisbury — Victorian Titan (1999) by Andrew Roberts

• The only true lasting benefit which the statesman can give to the poor man is so to shape matters that the greatest possible liberty for the exercise of his own moral and intellectual qualities should be offered to him by law.
  • Quoted in Salisbury — Victorian Titan (1999) by Andrew Roberts

Attributed

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

• It is one of the misfortunes of our political system that parties are formed more with reference to controversies that are gone by than to the controversies which these parties have actually to decide. (January 1866)

• Solitude shows us what should be; society shows us what we are.

External links

• "Lord Salisbury (1830-1903) The Libertarian" by Andrew Roberts

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