House Of Commons 6 Dec 1946 Quotes

So long as I am acting from duty and conviction, I am indifferent to taunts and jeers. I think they will probably do me more good than harm. ~ Winston S. Churchill

Until the late-nineteenth-century the House of Commons maintained a formal ban on the reporting of its debates. ~ Clive Ponting

No hard figures are available on how much was actually paid out or how many Friends complied with the request of their Yearly Meeting. For those who did pay their slaves, it was common to use the yearly wage of the day. We do know that one Mr. F. Buxton, in an appeal before the British House of Commons to abolish slavery, said that it had cost North Carolina Friends fifty thousand pounds to release their slaves.14 For some southern Friends emancipation of their slaves meant financial bankruptcy; for many, if not most, it meant eventual migration to the North. ~ Richard J. Foster

The House of Commons is called the Lower House, in twenty Acts of Parliament; but what are twenty Acts of Parliament amongst Friends? ~ John Selden

What the government has to do, if it wants to govern for any length of time, is it must appeal primarily to the third parties in the House of Commons to get them to support it. ~ Stephen Harper

The food in the House of Commons is fairly good. The cafe in Portcullis House is really very high quality, and you also have a choice of eating in the more traditional restaurants, the Churchill Room or the Members' Dining Room. I don't often eat in them, though, as I'm usually on the run. ~ Vince Cable

Had the heavens fallen and mixed themselves with the earth, had the people of London risen in rebellion with French ideas of equality,* had the Queen persistently declined to comply with the constitutional advice of her ministers, had a majority in the House of Commons lost its influence in the country, - the utter prostration of the bereft husband could not have been more complete. ~ Anthony Trollope

I knew Otto Kahn [According to the Figaro, Mr. Kahn on first going to America was a clerk in the firm of Speyer and Company, and married a grand-daughter of Mr. Wolf, one of the founders of Kuhn, Loeb & Company], the multi-millionaire, for many years. I knew him when he was a patriotic German. I knew him when he was a patriotic American. Naturally, when he wanted to enter the House of Commons, he joined the 'patriotic party.' ~ Denis Fahey

Bear Market Begin Bear Market End Max DD Sept 1929 June 1932 -86.25 July 1933 March 1935 -33.9% March 1937 March 1938 -54.5% Nov 1938 April 1942 -45.8% May 1946 June 1949 -29.6% July 1957 Oct 1957 -20.6% Dec 1961 June 1962 -28% Feb 1966 Oct 1966 -22.2% Oct 1968 May 1970 -34% Jan 1973 Oct 1974 -48.2% Sept 1976 March 1978 -19.4% Nov 1980 Aug 1982 -27.1% Aug 1987 Dec 1987 -40.4% July 1990 Oct 1990 -21.2% Mar 2000 Oct 2002 -49.1% June 2008 Mar 2009 -54% Average Bear Market: -37.3% Buy and Hold since 1942 Compounded Annual Rate of Return: 8.03% Maximum Draw down: 54% Prior to this decade's two severe bear markets, most investors believed that only that the stock market can go up. ~ Andrew Abraham

In politics, they found there were not enough females in the House of Commons, so they came up with the idea of shortlists having to have women on them. ~ Gordon Taylor

The House of Commons, refused to receive the addresses of the colonies, when the matter was pending; besides, we hold our rights neither from them nor from the Lords. ~ Christopher Gadsden

There's no secret about my ambition, I do not want to go into the House of Commons. My only real political interest is in London and if one day I'm in a position to run for mayor, then terrific. ~ Trevor Phillips

We shape our dwellings and afterwards our dwellings shape us. ~ Winston S. Churchill

Watching the Commons tribute to Margaret Thatcher was like being suffocated inside a gigantic sticky toffee pudding, but one with nasty bogeys planted inside. There was much of the 'Margaret Thatcher who was lucky enough to know me,' especially from her own side of the House. ~ Simon Hoggart

No man is regular in his attendance at the House of Commons until he is married. ~ Benjamin Disraeli

I appeal to the contemptible speech made lately by Sir Robert Peel to an applauding House of Commons. 'Orders of merit,' said he, 'were the proper rewards of the military' (the desolators of the world in all ages). 'Men of science are better left to the applause of their own hearts.' Most learned Legislator! Most liberal cotton-spinner! Was your title the proper reward of military prowess? Pity you hold not the dungeon-keys of an English Inquisition! Perhaps Science, like creeds, would flourish best under a little persecution. ~ John Joseph Griffin

Only people who look dull ever get into the House of Commons, and only people who are dull ever succeed there. ~ Oscar Wilde

I can't get very excited about the House of Commons these days because I don't feel the power is there. What is really bizarre is that you sense it is not in Washington either. It is now very hard even to locate the levers of power, let alone to pull them and change things. ~ Robert Harris

The receipt to make a speaker, and an applauded one too, is short and easy. Take common sense quantum sufficit; add a little application to the rules and orders of the House [of Commons], throw obvious thoughts in a new light, and make up the whole with a large quantity of purity, correctness and elegancy of style. Take it for granted that by far the greatest part of mankind neither analyze nor search to the bottom; they are incapable of penetrating deeper than the surface. ~ Lord Chesterfield

Well, why do you want a political career? Have you ever been in the House of Commons and taken a good square look at the inmates? As weird a gaggle of freaks and sub-humans as was ever collected in one spot. ~ P.G. Wodehouse

Elections exist for the sake of the House of Commons and not the House of Commons for the sake of elections. ~ Winston Churchill

You may scold your carpenter, when he has made a bad table, though you can't make a table yourself.' I say to you - 'Mr. Finch, you may point out a defect in a baby's petticoats, though you haven't got a baby yourself!' Doesn't that satisfy you? All right! Take another illustration. Look at your room here. I can see in the twinkling of an eye, that it's badly lit. You have only got one window - you ought to have two. Is it necessary to be a practical builder to discover that? Absurd! Are you satisfied now? No! Take another illustration. What's this printed paper, here, on the chimney-piece? Assessed Taxes. Ha! Assessed Taxes will do. You're not in the House of Commons; you're not a Chancellor of the Exchequer - but haven't you an opinion of your own about taxation, in spite of that? Must you and I be in Parliament before we can presume to see that the feeble old British Constitution is at its last gasp? ~ Wilkie Collins

Women have worked hard; starved in prison; given of their time and lives that we might sit in the House of Commons and take part in the legislating of this country. ~ Ellen Wilkinson

I am seeking every day to restore faith in Parliament - to ensure we have a House of Commons which is representative, effective and reconnected to the people we serve. ~ John Bercow

A man may speak very well in the House of Commons, and fail very completely in the House of Lords. There are two distinct styles requisite: I intend, in the course of my career, if I have time, to give a specimen of both. ~ Benjamin Disraeli

I'm going to reduce the size of the Cabinet, cut the number of ministers, reduce the size of the House of Commons, campaign for a European Parliament with 100 fewer members, halve the number of political advisers, and abolish a huge swathe of Labour's regional bureaucracies and agencies and their offices in Brussels. ~ William Hague

The members of the board were very sage, deep, philosophical men; and when they came to turn their attention to the workhouse, they found out at once, what ordinary folk would never have discovered - the poor people like it! It was a regular place of public entertainment for the poorer classes; a tavern where there was nothing to pay; a public breakfast, dinner, tea, and supper all year round; a brick and mortar elysium where it was all play and no work. "Oho!" said the board, looking very knowing; "we are the fellows to set this to rights; we'll stop it all in no time." So, they established the rule, that all poor people should have the alternative (for they would compel nobody, not they) of being starved by a gradual process in the house, or a quick one out of it. With this view, they contracted with the waterworks to lay on an unlimited supply of water; and with a corn-factor to supply periodically small quantities of oatmeal; and issued three meals of thin gruel per day, with an onion twice a week, and half a roll on Sundays. They made a great many other wise and humane regulations, having reference to the ladies, which it is not necessary to repeat; undertook to divorce poor married people, in consequence of the great expense of a suit in Doctor's Commons; and, instead of compelling a man to support his family, as they had theretofore done, took his family away from him, and made him a bachelor! There is no saying how many applicants for relief under these two heads, mig ~ Charles Dickens

The Government have consistently made it clear that the mechanism in the United Kingdom whereby the European draft constitutional treaty could be implemented is approval by the House of Commons followed by a referendum of the people of Britain. There is no question of implementing it by the back door. ~ Douglas Alexander

The majority of these old farts are content to crash out in a drunken stupor on the backbenches. They just want to pick up their company directorships at £200,000 a year, claim for everything they ever spend personally on expenses and make sure not to rock the boat. I have better things to do with my time than to waste it by voting a different yarn-spinning joker-in-the-pack in. Whoever's in power is not going to affect me in any way. And if you believe otherwise then you can truly nail your colours to the mast of stupidity ~ Karl Wiggins

When I first came to the House of Commons and walked out into the lobby, men sprang to their feet. I asked them to sit down since I'd come to walk around. I didn't want them doing me favours. ~ Agnes Macphail

We have a maxim in the House of Commons, and written on the walls of our houses, that old ways are the safest and surest ways. ~ Edward Coke

Churchill: The strangling of Bolshevism at its birth would have been an untold blessing to the human race.
Mr. Seymour Cocks (Labor Party): "If that had happened we should have lost the 1939 -45 war".
Churchill: No, it would have prevented that war.
[Speech in the House of Commons, May 11,1953] ~ Winston S. Churchill

The government's instinct is to shroud itself in secrecy - to act like the office of a president instead of as a collective cabinet government held to account by the elected House of Commons. ~ Charles Kennedy

I'm not going to play politics on the floor of the House of Commons. ~ John Turner

Really, this horrid House of Commons quite ruins our husbands for us. I think the Lower House by far the greatest blow to a happy married life that there has been since that terrible thing called the Higher Education of Women was invented. ~ Oscar Wilde

It is recorded how towards the end of the eighteenth century a Muslim visitor to England was taken to see the House of Commons at work. He later wrote of his astonishment at finding the that the British Parliament actually made laws and fixed punishments for their infraction - because unlike Muslims the English had not accepted a divine law revealed from heaven and therefore had to resort to such unsatisfactory expedients. Muslims still understand the expression 'the rule of law' very differently than do most Westerners. ~ Margaret Thatcher

I studied politics and economics at Bristol, and people always assumed that I'd go into politics or a non-government organisation when I left. I might well do this later on. I'd love to represent a West Country seat in the House of Commons. ~ Ben Elliot

It would be wholly wrong constitutionally for the unelected House of Lords to do anything, to kill anything of a financial nature that has been through the House of Commons not once but twice. ~ Nigel Lawson

A formative influence on my undergraduate self was the response of a respected elder statesmen of the Oxford Zoology Department when an American visitor had just publicly disproved his favourite theory. The old man strode to the front of the lecture hall, shook the American warmly by the hand and declared in ringing, emotional tones: 'My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years.' And we clapped our hands red. Can you imagine a Government Minister being cheered in the House of Commons for a similar admission? "Resign, Resign" is a much more likely response! ~ Richard Dawkins