Top 36 House Of Lords Quotes
#1. Take all your dukes and marquesses and earls and viscounts, pack them into one chamber, call it the House of Lords to satisfy their pride and then strip it of all political power. It's a solution so perfectly elegant and preposterous that only the British could have managed it.
Charles Krauthammer
#2. I do strongly believe myself that members of the government who sit in the House of Lords should be accountable to the elected House because otherwise there is a democratic deficit, and that is wrong.
John Bercow
#3. I go to the House of Lords in the afternoon and try to walk halfway. I may be thinking about what I'm going to write. It's much more satisfying than sitting in a chair.
Ruth Rendell
#4. The House of Lords is a model of how to care for the elderly.
Frank Field
#5. Anyone from abroad will tell you that it is the class system that really lies at the root of our problems, economic and industrial. The House of Lords symbolises that.
Tony Benn
#6. The cure for admiring the House of Lords is to go and look at it.
Walter Bagehot
#7. I?m not even sure I?d go into a reformed House of Lords. But let?s put it like this, the decision would have been easier had there been not even complete reform but a substantial stride.
Neil Kinnock
#8. A severe though not unfriendly critic of our institutions said that the cure for admiring the House of Lords was to go and look at it.
Walter Bagehot
#9. The House of Lords says I'm not a member of it. My passport says I am - get used to it.
Christopher Monckton
#10. We must restore faith in politics. Reform of the House of Lords is only one part of the answer, but it is a vital one.
Charles Kennedy
#12. What we need is someone to abolish the House Of Lords, get rid of the Royal Family ...
John Boorman
#13. Give them a corrupt House of Lords, give them a venal House of Commons, give they a tyrannical Prince, give them a truckling court, and let me have but an unfettered press. I will defy them to encroach a hair's breadth upon the liberties of England.
Richard Brinsley Sheridan
#14. We in the House of Lords are never in touch with public opinion. That makes us a civilised body.
Oscar Wilde
#15. 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
#16. The House of Lords is the British Outer Mongolia for retired politicians.
Tony Benn
#17. Labour politicians for generations have fought to bring democracy to the House of Lords.
Charles Kennedy
#18. Where might is, the right is:
Long purses make strong swords.
Let weakness learn meekness:
God save the House of Lords!
Algernon Charles Swinburne
#19. Look, I'm a member of the House of Lords and I'm the first to admit that I don't understand how one gets new laws through.
Alan Sugar
#20. I've always said that I favour an elected second chamber and I think it's important that there are members of the House of Lords who are willing to vote for their own demise.
Jim Knight
#21. The House of Lords must go - not be reformed, not be replaced, not be reborn in some nominated life-after-death patronage paradise, just closed down, abolished, finished.
Neil Kinnock
#22. I have a huge admiration for the House of Lords, I have a huge admiration for the people who work in the House of Lords, they're great public servants and they do an absolutely tremendous job.
John Major
#23. The House of Lords is like a glass of champagne that has stood for five days.
Clement Attlee
#24. The house of Lords must be the only institution in the world which is kept efficient by the persistent absenteeism of most of its members.
Herbert Samuel, 1st Viscount Samuel
#25. During the last 100 years, the House of Lords has never contributed one iota to popular liberties or popular freedom, or done anything to advance the common weal; but during that time it has protected every abuse and sheltered every privilege.
Joseph Chamberlain
#26. Every man has a House of Lords in his own head. Fears, prejudices, misconceptions - those are the peers and they are hereditary.
David Lloyd George
#27. The Government and the Parliament, even the House of Lords, will consent to a large increase of electors; and men who have not considered the subject fully will imagine they have gained much by the concession.
John Bright
#28. 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
#29. I am not going to the House of Lords. Never. That's not who I am. That's not where I am.
Gordon Brown
#30. Lives the man that can figure a naked Duke of Windlestraw addressing a naked House of Lords?
Thomas Carlyle
#31. The House of Lords has many fine aspects, but at its heart, it is a betrayal of the core democratic principle that those in the enlightened world hold so dear - that those who make the laws of the land should be elected by those who must obey those laws.
Charles Kennedy
#32. The House of Lords, an illusion to which I have never been able to subscribe - responsibility without power, the prerogative of the eunuch throughout the ages.
Tom Stoppard
#33. I don't believe in the hereditary principle in the House of Lords. Imagine going to the dentist, sitting in the chair and he says, 'I'm not a dentist myself, but my father was a dentist and his father before him. Now, open wide!
Tony Benn
#34. 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
#36. [I]n Great-Britain it is said that their constitution relies on the house of commons for honesty, and the lords for wisdom; whichwould be a rational reliance if honesty were to be bought with money, and if wisdom were hereditary.
Thomas Jefferson
