Update
Show Summary Details

Page of

PRINTED FROM OXFORD REFERENCE (www.oxfordreference.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2023. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single entry from a reference work in OR for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 11 October 2024

W. E. Gladstone 1809–98
British Liberal statesman, Prime Minister 1868–74, 1880–5, 1886, 1892–4 

  1. Ireland, Ireland! that cloud in the west, that coming storm.
    letter to his wife, 12 October 1845
  2. This is the negation of God erected into a system of Government.
    A Letter to the Earl of Aberdeen on the State Prosecutions of the Neapolitan Government (1851)
  3. Your business is not to govern the country but it is, if you think fit, to call to account those who do govern it.
    speech to the House of Commons, 29 January 1855
  4. You cannot fight against the future. Time is on our side.
    speech on the Reform Bill, in House of Commons, 27 April 1866
  5. Justice delayed is justice denied.
    speech on the state of Ireland, House of Commons, 16 March 1868; see Magna Carta
  6. My mission is to pacify Ireland.
    on receiving news that he was to form his first cabinet, 1st December 1868; H. C. G. Matthew Gladstone 1809–1874 (1986) ch. 5
  7. Swimming for his life, a man does not see much of the country through which the river winds.
    diary, 31 December 1868
  8. Let the Turks now carry away their abuses in the only possible manner, namely by carrying off themselves…one and all, bag and baggage, shall I hope clear out from the province they have desolated and profaned.
    Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East (1876)
  9. All the world over, I will back the masses against the classes.
    speech in Liverpool, 28 June 1886