Favourites
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Favourites’
It is not educational institutions and methods that advance science or the arts, but people.
Holding a degree or some other officially-recognised paper qualification is not really a guarantee of very much; as Samuel Smiles repeatedly observed, there is no substitute for hands-on experience, the quirks of an interesting personality, and sheer determination.
An aristocratic statesman was choked with emotion as he reflected on Britain’s creative social mobility.
The Industrial Revolution increased social mobility beyond all measure. Some shook their heads, but for most people, from ordinary working men to aristocratic statesmen, it was a matter of celebration and pride.
Benjamin Disraeli did not make a promising start to his Parliamentary career - but he did start with a promise.
Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881), Queen Victoria’s favourite Prime Minister, oversaw the expansion of the electorate as well as a range of social reforms aimed at improving the living and working conditions of the poorer classes. He was also an accomplished novelist, though his first attempts had been cruelly mocked by the critics, and his early political career fared little better.
Good government is not about enforcing uniform order, but about maximising liberty among a particular people.
Edmund Burke, MP for Bristol, would have had little truck with European ‘harmonisation’. He argued that the job of any government is to judge sensitively, for a particular people, the smallest degree of restraint needed to keep their freedom fresh — in that country, and at that time — and then stop.
Edmund Burke told fellow MPs that the only way to unite the peoples of the Empire was for London to set them an enviable example.
Edmund Burke reminded the House of Commons that her enviable international influence did not depend on government bureacracy or complex trade deals or military might. It arose from Britain’s ‘unique selling point’, a love of liberty her colonies could find nowhere else.
A young man from the Italian city on the Adige River demonstrates that class has nothing to do with wealth.
Samuel Smiles’s ‘Self-Help’ enthusiastically encouraged working men to take advantage of Britain’s entrepreneurial economy. Yet he never once promised riches; he promised dignity and self-respect, and told this tale to illustrate their superiority.