Whigs Quotes

“True the greater part of the Irish people was close to starvation. The numbers of weakened people dying from disease were rising. So few potatoes had been planted that, even if they escaped bight, they would not be enough to feed the poor folk who relied upon them. More and more of those small tenants and cottagers, besides, were being forced off the land and into a condition of helpless destitution. Ireland, that is to say, was a country utterly prostrated.
Yet the Famine came to an end. And how was this wonderful thing accomplished? Why, in the simplest way imaginable. The famine was legislated out of existence. It had to be. The Whigs were facing a General Election.”
― Edward Rutherfurd, The Rebels of Ireland

“The right-wing Tories and the conservative Whigs fought Napoleon as the Usurper and the Enemy of the Established Order; the liberal Tories and the radical Whigs fought him as the Betrayer of the Revolution and the Enslaver of Europe; they were all agreed in fighting him, and his notion that their disagreement signified national disunion was mere wishful thinking. All dictators since his time have fallen into the same trap: themselves blind to the values of liberty, they cannot conceive that people who disagree on its meaning can nevertheless unite in upholding their freedoms against patent despotism.”
― J. Christopher Herold, The Age of Napoleon

“The highest eulogy which can be pronounced on the revolution of 1688 is this, that it was our last revolution. Several generations have now passed away since any wise and patriotic Englishman has meditated resistance to the established government. In all honest and reflecting minds there is a conviction, daily strengthened by experience, that the means of effecting every improvement which the constitution requires may be found within the constitution itself.”
― Thomas Babington Macaulay

“If this had been France, and the Queen had been Louis XIV, it would have been done by now-but it was England, Parliament had its knobby fingers around the Monarch’s throat, and Whigs and Tories were joined in an eternal shin-kicking contest to determine which faction should have the honor of throttling her Majesty, and how hard.”
― Neal Stephenson, Solomon's Gold

“Tickler: I hate novelties. Is the prosecution mania about to subside, think you? Now-a-days, every word is said to be actionable. You cannot open your mouth, or put pen to paper, without feeing a libel-lawyer. An Edinburgh Whig, and really some of the London ones seem no better, is an animal without a skin. [The Whigs] have entered into a cowardly compact to prosecute every syllable that shall ever be written against any one of their degraded and slanderous selves.”
― John Wilson, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 11, Issue 63: 1822-04