British statesman (1848-1930)
The constant pressure of custom; the effects of imitation, of education, and of habit; the incalculable influence of man on man, produce a working uniformity of conviction more effectually than the gallows and the stake, though without the cruelty, and with far more than the wisdom that have usually been vouchsafed to official persecutors.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Essays and Addresses
The source of knowledge must be rational. If this be granted, you rule out Mechanism, you rule out Naturalism, you rule out Agnosticism; and a lofty form of Theism becomes, as I think, inevitable.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Theism and Humanism
It is absurd to ascribe corrupt motives to large bodies of men, merely because the economic theories they adopt are in accordance with their own interests.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Essays and Addresses
Growth in Knowledge, like productiveness in Art, can hardly, so far as its direct consequences are concerned, do otherwise than subserve the cause of progress.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Essays and Addresses
The General Strike has taught the working class more in four days than years of talking could have done.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
speech, May 7, 1926
The brightest light has cast the deepest shadows. To torture and enslave, not because it brings profit to the victor, but because it brings pain to the vanquished, has, through long ages, been deemed a fitting sequel to victories born of the most heroic courage and the noblest self-sacrifice; while no small part of moral progress has consisted in expelling this perverted altruism from the accepted ideals of civilized mankind.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Theism and Humanism
How, then, are we to class this strange amalgam of criticism and credulity? What purpose can it serve? To whom will it appeal? Whose beliefs will it alter even by a hair's breadth?
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Theism and Humanism
The oratorio, then, stands pre-eminent, at least in the infancy of orchestration, among all the modes in which music may be wedded to dramatic poetry. It, and it alone, gives the musician the utmost latitude in the choice of his subject, and in the employment of his resources. It is Handel's glory to have perceived its capabilities, and to have developed them in a manner undreamed of by his predecessors, and unsurpassed by even the greatest of his successors.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Essays and Addresses
Literary immortality is an unsubstantial fiction devised by literary artists for their own especial consolation. It means, at the best, an existence prolonged through an infinitesimal fraction of that infinitesimal fraction of the world's history during which man has played his part upon it.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Essays and Addresses
Those who look forward to a period of continuous and, so to speak, inevitable progress, are bound to assign some more solid reason for their convictions than a merely empirical survey of the surface lessons of history.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
A Fragment on Progress
It must, I think, be admitted that most men approach the difficulties of a scientific exposition far more hopefully than the difficulties of a metaphysical argument. They will take more trouble because they expect more result.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Theism and Humanism
It is only the thinnest surface layer of law and custom, belief and sentiment, which can either be successfully subjected to destructive treatment, or become the nucleus of any new growth—a fact which explains the apparent paradox that so many of our most famous advances in political wisdom are nothing more than the formal recognition of our political impotence.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Essays and Addresses
It seems at first sight strange that any man of genius should have patiently submitted to rules which, from the point of view of art, were perfectly arbitrary.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Essays and Addresses
Consider the commonplace life of a commonplace man as it develops in the untroubled prosperity of a steady business and a quiet home. Such a career seems as orderly and uniform as the flood I have been describing is terrible and strange. Surely no supernatural calculator is required to cast the horoscope of its hero: for he does, and leaves undone, the same actions, he thinks and leaves unthought the same ideas, as thousands of his contemporaries; and, so far as outward appearance goes, he is an indistinguishable member of an undistinguished crowd.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Theism and Humanism
There is, even from my point of view, a great difference between beauty in art and beauty in nature. For, in the case of nature, there is no artist; while, as I observed just now, "a work of art requires an artist, not merely in the order of natural causation, but in the order of aesthetic necessity. It conveys a message which is valueless to the recipient unless it be understood by the sender.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Theism and Humanism
Now it is quite true that when we examine our own system of beliefs we cannot imitate this attitude of complete detachment, since in the very act of examination some of these beliefs are assumed. But we can examine the beliefs of other people, and we do, as a matter of common-sense practice, rate low the value of the beliefs whose sources we perceive to be non-rational. How, then, can we refuse to apply to ourselves a principle of judgment which we thus apply without scruple to our neighbors?
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Theism and Humanism
Change is never more than a redistribution of that which never changes.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Theism and Humanism
We must regard the raw material, as I have called it, of civilization as being now, in all probability, at its best, and henceforth for the amelioration of mankind we must look to the perfection of manufacture.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Essays and Addresses
Our whole political machinery presupposes a people so fundamentally at one that they can safely afford to bicker.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
introduction, The English Constitution
It may well be that if mankind could draw up a hedonistic balance-sheet, the pleasures of mundane existence would turn out to be greater than its sufferings.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Theism and Humanism