David Lloyd George Quotes - Page 3

You get to know more of the character of a man in a round of golf than in six months of political experience.

Liberty is not merely a privilege to be conferred; it is a habit to be acquired.

Unemployment, with its injustice for the man who seeks and thirsts for employment, who begs for labour and cannot get it, and who is punished for failure he is not responsible for by the starvation of his children--that torture is something that private enterprise ought to remedy for its own sake.

What do you want to be a sailor for? There are greater storms in politics than you will ever find at sea. Piracy, broadsides, blood on the decks. You will find them all in politics.

Great men sometimes lose the reins and lose their heads. This time, let us hope that they will retain them and that when victory is assured they will sit down and reckon what the future is going to be for their countries as well as for other lands.

A body of 500 men chosen at random from amongst the unemployed.

The home front is always underrated by Generals in the field. And yet that is where the Great War was won and lost. The Russian, Bulgarian, Austrian and German home fronts fell to pieces before their armies collapsed.

The Bolshevists would blow up the fabric with high explosive, with horror. Others would pull down with the crowbars and with cranks--especially with cranks. . . . Sweating, slums, the sense of semi-slavery in labour, must go. We must cultivate a sense of manhood by treating men as men.

Doctinaires are the vultures of principle. They feed upon principle after it is dead.

The conventional heaven with its angels perpetually singing etc nearly drove me mad in my youth and made me an atheist for ten years. My opinion is that we shall be reincarnated.

Wild men, screaming through the keyholes.

Every man has a House of Lords in his own head. Fears, prejudices, misconceptions - those are the peers and they are hereditary.

I am the last man in the world to say that the succor which is given us from America is not in itself something to rejoice at greatly. But I also say that I can see more in the knowledge that America is going to win a right to be at the conference table when the terms of peace are discussed. . . . It would have been a tragedy for mankind if America had not been there, and there with all her influence and power.

[Lloyd George] said that Harding's speech on American naval aspirations made him feel that he would pawn his shirt rather than allow America to dominate the seas. If this was to be the outcome of the League of Nations propaganda, he was sorry for the world and in particular for America.

Neville [Chamberlain] has a retail mind in a wholesale business.

You can't cross a chasm in two small jumps.

There is nothing more dangerous than to leap a chasm in two jumps.

Great Britain would spend her last guinea to keep a navy superior to that of the United States or any other power.

[Proportional representation is a] device for defeating democracy, the principle of which was that the majority should rule, and for bringing faddists of all kinds into Parliament, and establishing groups and disintegrating parties.

One cannot cross an abyss in two jumps.

Explain to me again the difference between superstitious beliefs or pagan incantations, and scientific ones. Be braver - you cannot cross a chasm in two small jumps.

Winston [Churchill] is the only remaining specimen of a real Tory.

The stern hand of fate has scourged us to an elevation where we can see the great everlasting things which matter for a nation - the great peaks we had forgotten, of Honor, Duty, Patriotism, and clad in glittering white, the great pinnacle of Sacrifice pointing like a rugged finger to Heaven.