David Lloyd George Quotes

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.

We are fighting Germany, Austria and drink, and as far as I can see, the greatest of these three deadly foes is drink.

No democracy has ever long survived the failure of its adherents to be ready to die for it. My own conviction is this, the people must either go on or go under.

Diplomats were invented simply to waste time.

It is either Christ or chaos.

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

[The General Staff] maintained three sets of casualty figures, one to fool the public, one to fool the Government and one to fool themselves.

The man who tries to make the flag an object of a single party is a greater traitor to that flag than any man who fires at it.

Peace must be framed on so equitable a basis, that the nations would not wish to disturb it ... so that the confidence of the German people shall be put in the equity of their cause and not in the might of their armies.

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.

The finest eloquence is that which gets things done; the worst is that which delays them.

The doctors are always changing their opinions. They always have some new fad.

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.

Four specters haunt the Poor - Old Age, Accident, Sickness and Unemployment. We are going to exorcise them. We are going to drive hunger from the hearth. We mean to banish the workhouse from the horizon of every workman in the land.

Don't be afraid to take a big step if one is indicated. You can't cross a chasm in two small jumps.

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

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.

He has sat on the fence so long that the iron has entered his soul.

Lucidity of speech is unquestionably one of the surest tests of mental precision ... In my experience a confused talker is never a clear thinker.

Sincerity is the surest road to confidence.

Once blood is shed in a national quarrel reason and right are swept aside by the rage of angry men.

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.

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

It is always too late, or too little, or both. And that is the road to disaster.

A politician is a person with whose politics you don't agree; if you agree with him he's a statesman.

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.

There is no greater mistake than to try to leap an abyss in two jumps.

A young man who isn't a socialist hasn't got a heart; an old man who is a socialist hasn't got a head.

Wild men, screaming through the keyholes.

By thetest of our faith thehighest standard ofcivilization is the readiness to sacrifice for others.

Of all the bigotries that savage the human temper there is none so stupid as the anti-Semitic.

Liberty has restraints but no frontiers.

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

If the people really knew [the truth] the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don't know and can't know.

If you want to understand a subject promise to speak on it.

Who ordained that the few should have the land (of Britain) as a prerequisite; who made 10,000 people owners of the soil and the rest of us trespassers in the land of our birth?

Aristrocracy is like cheese. The older it is the higher it becomes.

If you want to succeed in politics you must keep your conscience firmly under control.

One cannot cross an abyss in two jumps.

The nations slithered over the brink into the boiling cauldron of war without any trace of apprehension or dismay ... The nations backed their machines over the precipice not one of them wanted war, certainly not on this scale

[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.

There is nothing so fatal to character as half finished tasks.

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.

You cannot trust the interests of any class entirely to another class; and you cannot trust the interests of any sex to another sex.

A fully equipped duke costs as much to keep up as two Dreadnoughts, and dukes are just as great a terror - and they last longer.

Believe me, Germany is unable to wage war.