Top 60 William Ewart Gladstone Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Justice delayed is justice denied.”

— William Ewart Gladstone

Featured in: Principles And Laws

2. “Show me the manner in which a nation or a community cares for its dead and I will measure with mathematical exactness the tender sympathies of its people, their respect for the laws of the land and their loyalty to high ideals.”

— William Ewart Gladstone

3. “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.”

— William Ewart Gladstone

4. “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.”

— William Ewart Gladstone

5. “Liberalism is trust of the people tempered by prudence. Conservatism is distrust of the people tempered by fear.”

— William Ewart Gladstone

6. “To serve Armenia is to serve civilization.”

— William Ewart Gladstone

Featured in: Quotes About Civilization

7. “Selfishness is the greatest curse of the human race.”

— William Ewart Gladstone

8. “Be happy with what you have and are, be generous with both, and you won’t have to hunt for happiness.”

— William Ewart Gladstone

9. “As the British Constitution is the most subtle organism which has proceeded from progressive history, so the American Constitution is the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man.”

— William Ewart Gladstone

10. “Commerce is the equalizer of the wealth of nations.”

— William Ewart Gladstone

11. “Be thorough in all you do; and remember that although ignorance often may be innocent, pretension is always despicable.”

— William Ewart Gladstone

12. “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.”

— William Ewart Gladstone

13. “I have known ninety-five of the world’s great men in my time, and of these eighty-seven were followers of the Bible.”

— William Ewart Gladstone

14. “Ireland, Ireland. That cloud in the west, that coming storm.”

— William Ewart Gladstone

15. “Books are delightful society. If you go into a room and find it full of books – even without taking them from the shelves they seem to speak to you, to bid you welcome.”

— William Ewart Gladstone

16. “Censure and criticism never hurt anybody. If false, they can’t hurt you unless you are wanting in manly character; and if true, they show a man his weak points, and forewarn him against failure and trouble.”

— William Ewart Gladstone

17. “No one ever became great except through many and great mistakes.”

— William Ewart Gladstone

18. “The American Revolution was a vindication of liberties inherited and possessed. It was a conservative revolution.”

— William Ewart Gladstone

19. “Nothing that is morally wrong can be politically right.”

— William Ewart Gladstone

20. “For works of the mind really great there is no old age, no decrepitude. It is inconceivable that a time should come when Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, should not ring in the ears of civilized man.”

— William Ewart Gladstone

21. “The disease of an evil conscience is beyond the practice of all the physicians of all the countries in the would.”

— William Ewart Gladstone

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

— William Ewart Gladstone

23. “I think that the principle of the Conservative Party is jealousy of liberty and of the people, only qualified by fear ; but I think the principle of the Liberal Party is trust in the people, only qualified by prudence .”

— William Ewart Gladstone

24. “National injustice is the surest road to national downfall.”

— William Ewart Gladstone

25. “From the time I took office as Chancellor of the Exchequer, I began to learn that the State held, in the face of the Bank and the City, an essentially false position as to finance. The Government itself was not to be a substantive power, but was to leave the Money Power supreme and unquestioned.”

— William Ewart Gladstone

26. “Thrift of time will repay you in after-life with a thousandfold of profit beyond your most sanguine dreams.”

— William Ewart Gladstone

27. “There should be a sympathy with freedom, a desire to give it scope, founded not upon visionary ideas, but upon the long experience of many generations within the shores of this happy isle, that in freedom you lay the firmest foundations both of loyalty and order.”

— William Ewart Gladstone

28. “To be engaged in opposing wrong affords but a slender guarantee for being right.”

— William Ewart Gladstone

29. “Be inspired with the belief that life is a great and noble calling; not a mean and groveling thing that we are to shuffle through as we can, but an elevated and lofty destiny.”

— William Ewart Gladstone

30. “Remember the rights of the savage, as we call him. Remember that the happiness of his humble home, remember that the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan, among the winter snows, is as inviolable in the eye of Almighty God, as can be your own.”

— William Ewart Gladstone

31. “Budgets are not merely affairs of arithmetic, but in a thousand ways go to the root of prosperity of individuals, the relation of classes and the strength of kingdoms.”

— William Ewart Gladstone

32. “To call a man a characteristically Oxford man is, in my opinion, to give him the highest compliment that could be paid to any human being.”

— William Ewart Gladstone

33. “We are bound to lose Ireland in consequence of years of cruelty, stupidity and misgovernment and I would rather lose her as a friend than as a foe.”

— William Ewart Gladstone

34. “You cannot fight against future. Time is on its side.”

— William Ewart Gladstone

35. “I am inclined to say that the personal attendance and intervention of women in election proceedings, even apart from any suspicion of the wider objects of many of the promoters of the present movement, would be a practical evil not only of the gravest, but even of an intolerable character.”

— William Ewart Gladstone

36. “Swimming for his life, a man does not see much of the country through which the river winds, and I probably know little of these years through which I busily work and live, beyond this, how sin and frailty deface them, and how mercy crowns them.”

— William Ewart Gladstone

37. “There is a limit to the work that can be got out of a human body or a human brain, and he is a wise man who wastes no energy on pursuits for which he is not fitted; and he is still wiser who, from among the things that he can do well, chooses and resolut.”

— William Ewart Gladstone

38. “The oppression of a majority is detestable and odious; the oppression of a minority is only by one degree less detestable and odious.”

— William Ewart Gladstone

39. “I venture to say that every man who is not presumably incapacitated by some consideration of personal unfitness or of political danger is morally entitled to come within the pale of the Constitution.”

— William Ewart Gladstone

40. “All the wonders of the Greek civilization heaped together are less wonderful than the single book of Psalms. Greece had all that this world could give her; but the flowers of Paradise blossomed in Palestine alone.”

— William Ewart Gladstone

41. “The ravages of drink are greater than those of war pestilence and famine combined.”

— William Ewart Gladstone

42. “All the world over, I will back the masses against the classes.”

— William Ewart Gladstone

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

— William Ewart Gladstone

44. “Never forget that the purpose for which a man lives is the improvement of the man himself, so that he may go out of this world having, in his great sphere or his small one, done some little good for his fellow creatures and labored a little to diminish the sin and sorrow that are in the world.”

— William Ewart Gladstone

45. “The resources of civilization are not yet exhausted.”

— William Ewart Gladstone

46. “He is the purest figure in history. About George Washington.”

— William Ewart Gladstone

47. “Decision by majorities is as much an expedient as lighting by gas.”

— William Ewart Gladstone

48. “If Germany is to become a colonizing power, all I say is, God speed her! She becomes our ally and partner in the execution of the great purposes of Providence for the advantage of mankind.”

— William Ewart Gladstone

49. “Nothing more surely cultivates and embellishes a man than association with refined and virtuous women.”

— William Ewart Gladstone

50. “My only hope for the world is in bringing the human mind into contact with divine revelation.”

— William Ewart Gladstone