on tea!...

“If you are cold, tea will warm you; if you are too heated, it will cool you; If you are depressed, it will cheer you; If you are excited, it will calm you.”

on oneness...

"I do not believe that God’s mercies are restricted to a small portion of the human family. . . I was myself brought up to believe that salvation depended absolutely upon the reception of a particular and very narrow creed."

on humanity...

"All human beings  have the same claims upon our support. The ground on which we stand here is not British or European, but it is human. Nothing narrower than humanity could pretend for a moment justly to represent it."

on peace...

"We look forward to the time when the power of love will replace the love of power. Then will our world know the blessings of peace"

on justice...

“Justice delayed is justice denied”

on books...

“ . . . books are the voices of the dead. They are a main instrument in communion with the vast human procession of the other world. They are the allies of the thought of men . . . In a room well filled with them, no one has felt or can feel solitary.”

"It is in libraries like this that a youth may derive the greatest benefit. His mind is full of material; it . . . may impart the vital spark to it, that may inspire him with ideas altogether new, with a sense that his mind is capable of progress, that his faculties if used assiduously and continuously to a given purpose, will assuredly obtain a valuable end."

“We ought to recollect ... that a book consists, like man, from whom it draws its lineage, of a body and a soul.”

“The binding of a book is the dress with which it walks out into the world. The paper, type and ink are the body, in which its soul is domiciled. And these three, soul, body, and habilament, are a triad which ought to be adjusted to one another by the laws of harmony and good sense.”

"Books are a delightful society. If you go into a room filled with books, even without taking them down from their shelves, they seem to speak to you, to welcome you."                               

on conduct...

“Men are apt to mistake the strength of their feeling for the strength of their argument. The heated mind resents the chill touch and relentless scrutiny of logic.”

“To be engaged in opposing wrong affords, under the conditions of our mental constitution, but a slender guarantee for being right.”

“No man ever became great or good except through many and great mistakes.”

on equality...

"But long, long, have I cast those weeds behind me. Remember that the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan among the winter snows, are as inviolable in the eye of Almighty God as can be your own. Remember that He who has united you together as human beings in the same flesh and blood, has bound you by the law of mutual love, that that mutual love is not limited by the shores of this island, is not limited by the boundaries of Christian civilisation, that it passes over the whole surface of the earth, and embraces the meanest along with the greatest in its unmeasured scope."

on happiness...

“Be happy with what you have and are, be generous with both, and you won't have to haunt for happiness”
 

on religion....

"Nurture in us an allegiance coming from the heart, rooted in the mind, governing the conduct"  

"Gladstone believed that God had sent him to act as he did, gave him extra strength to speak and commanded him to take charge at times of crisis. All his life long he was sustained by the thought that – while a great sinner himself – he had been picked out to do the Lord’s work." – M.R.D. Foot

on democracy...

"Liberalism is trust of the people tempered by prudence. Conservatism is distrust of the people tempered by fear."

"Nothing that is morally wrong can be politically right."

"It is the duty of government to make it difficult for people to do wrong, easy to do right."

"You cannot fight against the future. Time is on our side."

"I was brought up to hate and fear liberty. I came to love it. That is the secret of my whole career.”

“Here is my first principle of foreign policy: good government at home.”

“Upon one great class of subjects, the largest and the most weighty of them all, where the leading and determining considerations that ought to lead to a conclusion are truth, justice, and humanity, there, gentlemen, all the world over, I will back the masses against the classes.”

on Disraeli...

"As he lived, so he died — all display, without reality or genuineness."

on the meaning of life...

"Never forget that the purpose for which we live is our improvement , so that we may go out of this world having, in a great sphere or a small one, done some little good for our fellow creatures and laboured a little to diminish the sin and sorrow that are in the world." 

"Be inspired with the belief that life is a great and noble calling, not a mean and grovelling thing that we are to shuffle through as best we can, but an elevated and lofty destiny."

“Failure is success if we learn from it.”

“No man ever became great or good except through many and great mistakes.”

on human rights...

"All human beings have the same claims upon our support. The ground on which we stand here is not British or European, but it is human. Nothing narrower than humanity could pretend for a moment justly to represent it."