Tory Quotes - page 6
I'd like to tell you that I come from a long line of German aristocracy and that I'm very rich, but actually it's a very boring explanation. A man called Tommy Tutt married a lady called Jane Rhind, and suddenly I've got a very posh name. And then my parents called me Julian, and suddenly I sound like a prospective Tory MP for West London!
Julian Rhind-Tutt
The movement towards philanthropy instead of persecution, as an outlet for religious enthusiasm, was one of the characteristic fruits of the Revolution, as also was the improvement in public justice, both political and criminal. Because the Revolution Settlement was not a party victory, but an agreed compromise between Whig and Tory, Church and Dissent, it made humanity, moderation and co-operation the main current of affairs in the Eighteenth Century.
G. M. Trevelyan
When the political history of the Blair era is written, it may well be concluded that the most effective conservative opposition came not from politicians, but journalists. It often seems that the charge against New Labour is led by the Telegraph and Spectator, by Charles Moore and Boris Johnson, or from some Murdoch journalists, rather than by William Hague. So perhaps it should not comes [sic] as a complete surprise that the most sustained, internally logical and powerful attack on Tony Blair and all his works should be a polemic by a right-wing journalist, Peter Hitchens, rather than a Tory pamhlet or an MP's speech. ...
On much of this agenda, Hitchens is simply out of time. ... [T]he idea of a widespread return to a belief in literal damnation, to public hostility towards homosexuals and the shaming of single mothers, seems utterly implausible.
Peter Hitchens
King William asked Mr. Locke how long he thought the revolution principles might last in England. The philosopher answered, "Till this generation shall have passed away, and our universities shall have had time to breed a new one." Many things I disapprove in our universities, where the country gentlemen are educated in Toryism by Tory clergy.
Horace Walpole
[For Winston Churchill], democracy is a state in which the people acquiesce in the rule of property. Democracy is an admirable institution so long as the poor continue to carry the rich on their backs. When the poor decide to change places, democracy falls into disrepute. That is why, whenever you scratch a Tory, you find a Fascist.
Aneurin Bevan
In conditions of free enterprise and competition, one does not have to contrive modernisation or introduce it by government decree. It happens, and keeps on happening, of its own accord. A firm or an industry or an attitude which is no longer modern simply does not survive; it goes under and is replaced by others which are modern. Our motor industry, our chemical industry, yes, our steel industry, do not have to be told to modernise themselves. They keep on doing it because they have to, in order to export and meet the challenge of a fiercely competitive and rapidly changing world. If Britain wants to be modern, there is no substitute for the system of competitive free enterprise by which the Tory Party stands.
Enoch Powell
In 1940 the voice which cried "Speak for England" came from a Tory bench. It comes from there no longer... The Conservative Party declared that the nation state as exemplified by an independent and self-governing United Kingdom was obsolete. Thereby for me the Conservative Party ceased to be the Conservative Party which I thought I knew.
Enoch Powell
![[After the Batley and Spen by-election in July 2021 at which he was a candidate.] Galloway says he abhors antisemitism, which makes it rotten luck that one of his aides was exposed as a Holocaust denier. Hard to imagine what might have drawn such a person to an avowed anti-racist, but there we are. When the Galloway travelling circus comes to town, it always brings the same trouble, pitting communities against each other, stirring up fear and loathing. But this time he did it in a seat that knew the lethal cost of political hatred. It's a mystery why some still treat him as part of the left, granting him leeway as a fellow progressive. He voted Tory in May's Scottish elections and backed Nigel Farage's Brexit party in 2019. (George Galloway)](https://static.quotesdtb.com/img/quotes_images/96/george-galloway-by-election-1006496.jpg)
The collective wisdom and the collective will of the nation resides not in any little Whitehall clique but in the whole mass of the people-in the producers, listening to the voice of the customer at home and abroad; in the savers and investors, using their eyes and their brains to lay out their resources to best advantage; in the consumers themselves, expressing through all the complex nervous system of the market their wishes, their needs, their expectations. In short, the true national economic plan is being made all the time by the very people and institutions which the intellectual arrogance of the Socialist affects to despise. "Under Tory free enterprise" says Labour's policy, "no limit is set to the amount of our national resources and intellectual talent consumed by the popular newspaper, the glossy magazine, the cinema, commercial television and the advertising industry." What a world of contempt for the ordinary man and woman breathes in that haughty sentence!
Enoch Powell
The main Tory supporter on our side [during the 1975 EEC referendum] was Enoch Powell. It could have been politically embarrassing, but Enoch played it straight down the line, scrupulously keeping party politics out of it. He also revealed old-world courtesy. When, for instance, we found that a press conference we had arranged for him clashed with one I had been hoping to hold, he insisted on giving way to me, postponing his own. In fact, he showed more sense of solidarity than Tony Benn, who like so many politicians with exceptional talents did not like working in a team.
Enoch Powell
We badly need another Enoch Powell to articulate the role of the nation state in the twenty-first century, but until such a paragon appears, we can return to the canon of his writings and speeches to remind us why the nation state still does and should matter... As well as Disraeli, but very few Tory thinkers since, Enoch Powell himself had a mission "to teach the English their nationhood", as well as a genius for defining it.
Enoch Powell
He abhors the label right and calls himself a Tory radical. For him the essence of Powellism is its frankly Gaullist emphasis on national independence and its marking out of political ground in which a realistic patriotism can flourish again. But paradoxically it is not rightist in the old-style Tory sense. Mr. Powell, unlike the true Tory right, calls for a withdrawal from Empire not even into Europe but into Britain... Mr. Powell is seen by his lieutenants as the latter-day Joe Chamberlain in the Tory Party, the boy from "Brum" who, though he is unlikely ever to lead his party, will change its orientation and nature by driving it into a Gaullist radicalism rather than on to the right.
Enoch Powell
Cyril Chantler, one of Britain's wisest doctors, likes to give people a photocopy of Enoch Powell's book on medicine and politics and tell them that it's the best thing ever written on the NHS. Younger readers may not have heard of Enoch Powell, but he was a Tory minister of health in the early 1960s. He is most famous for his racist "rivers of blood speech," and I can remember protesting outside his Belgravia home. Could he really have written the best book on the NHS? I think that Cyril is right. One of Powell's strengths is that he was a distinguished classicist and writes beautifully, with directness, clarity, and wit: it's like reading Tacitus on the NHS. Another strength is his inability to dissimulate; the source of his catastrophic speech, his weakness as a politician, and his most famous observation that "all political careers end in failure."
Enoch Powell
