13 Benjamin Disraeli Quotes on Governance

Benjamin Disraeli quotes on governance

1. To govern men, you must either excel them in their accomplishments, or despise them.

6. Consider Ireland. You have a starving population, an absentee aristocracy, and an alien Church, and in addition the weakest executive in the world. That is the Irish Question.

14. Things must be done by parties, not by persons using parties as tools.

24. Finality is not the language of politics.

50. The most distinguishing feature, or, at least, one of the most distinguishing features, of the great change effected in 1832 was that those who effected it at once abolished all the franchises as ancient as those of the Baronage of England; and, while they abolished them, they offered and proposed no substitute. The discontent upon the subject of representation which afterwards more or less pervaded our society dates from that period, and that discontent, all will admit, has ceased. It was terminated by the Act of Parliamentary Reform of 1867-8. That act was founded on a confidence that the great body of the people of this country were 'Conservative'. I use the word in its purest and loftiest sense. I mean that the people of England, and especially the working classes of England, are proud of belonging to a great country, and wish to maintain its greatness-that they are proud of belonging to an Imperial country, and are resolved to maintain, if they can, the empire of England-that they believe, on the whole, that the greatness and the empire of England are to be attributed to the ancient institutions of this country...There are people who may be, or who at least affect to be, working men, and who, no doubt, have a certain influence with a certain portion of the metropolitan working class, who talk Jacobinism...I say with confidence that the great body of the working class of England utterly repudiate such sentiments. They have no sympathy with them. They are English to the core. They repudiate cosmopolitan principles. They adhere to national principles. They are for maintaining the greatness of the kingdom and the empire, and they are proud of being subjects of our Sovereign and members of such an Empire. Well, then, as regards the political institutions of this country, the maintenance of which is one of the chief tenets of the Tory party, so far as I can read public opinion, the feeling of the nation is in accordance with the Tory party.

113. No Government can be long secure without a formidable Opposition. It reduces their supporters to that tractable number which can be managed by the joint influences of fruition and hope. It offers vengeance to the discontented, and distinction to the ambitious; and employs the energies of aspiring spirits, who otherwise may prove traitors in a division or assassins in a debate.

127. The world is governed by very different personages to what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.

145. Power has only one duty: to secure the social welfare of the People.

161. The world is weary of statesmen whom democracy has degraded into politicians.

175. An insular country, subject to fogs, and with a powerful middle class, requires grave statesmen.

221. The governments of the present day have to deal not merely with other governments, with emperors, kings and ministers, but also with the secret societies which have everywhere their unscrupulous agents, and can at the last moment upset all the governments' plans.

241. Without publicity there can be no public support, and without public support every nation must decay.

254. The art of governing mankind by deceiving them.