Top 17 Gladstone Quotes & Sayings

Mr. Gladstone read Homer for fun, which I thought served him right.

Posterity will do justice to that unprincipled maniac Gladstone - extraordinary mixture of envy, vindictiveness, hypocrisy and superstition; and with one commanding characteristic - whether Prime Minister or Leader of the Opposition, whether preaching, praying, speechifying or scribbling - never a gentleman.

William Ewart Gladstone is credited with the credo that a prime minister must be a "good butcher." The metaphor is apt insofar as the root of the word "decision" is "to cut."

I grew up in Gladstone, Alabama, on a dirt road, with an outside bathroom.

I used to wait tables at Gladstone's, a seafood restaurant, day in and day out. I made some of my best friends there. I taught dance and acting lessons to kids. It was awesome - an outreach program, Voices Unheard. I was a messenger for a couple of months.

I was radicalised by being a minister. That's when I saw how the system really worked. And that is not a very usual process, but it certainly happened to me: it gave me a lot more experience, it helped me to understand where power really lay, develop strategies for undermining or changing it, and so on. But that isn't the norm. Mr Gladstone moved to the left as he got older, and one or two other people have, but normally you swing the other way.

It was said that Mr. Gladstone could persuade most people of most things, and himself of anything.

Disraeli was my favourite Tory. He was an adventurer pure and simple, or impure and complex. I'm glad to say Gladstone got the better of him.

There must be what Mr. Gladstone many years ago called a blessed act of oblivion. We must all turn our backs upon the horrors of the past. We must look to the future. We cannot afford to drag forward across the years that are to come the hatreds and revenges which have sprung from the injuries of the past.

That is Gladstone, the greatest statesman that ever lived. I intend to be a statesman, too.

Besides, I'd heard too many Karen Carpenter tales at Gladstone PTA meetings, and they often took the form of boasts. The prestigious diagnosis of anorexia seemed much coveted not only by the students but by their mothers, who would compete over whose daughter ate less. No wonder the poor girls were a mess.

The difference between a misfortune and a calamity is this: If Gladstone fell into the Thames, it would be a misfortune. But if someone dragged him out again, that would be a calamity.

William Gladstone has not a single redeeming defect.

British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone spent his declining years trying to guess the answer to the Irish Question; unfortunately, whenever he was getting warm, the Irish secretly changed the Question.

Why, sir, there is every probability that you will soon be able to tax it! Said to William Gladstone, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, when he asked about the practical worth of electricity.

The Queen has done all she could on the dreadful subject of vivisection, and hopes that Mr. Gladstone will speak strongly against such a practice which is a disgrace to humanity.

When I left the dining room after sitting next to Mr. Gladstone, I thought he was the cleverest man in England. But after sitting next to Mr. Disraeli, I thought I was the cleverest woman in England.