Top 100 Quotes About Commons
#1. 'Creative Commons' is the self-congratulatory name of a self-congratulatory movement. Somewhat like kibbutz on the Internet, the idea is to write programs - 'free ware' - and distribute them without charge.
Mark Helprin
#2. Saul took their fear of the Philistines personally. Rejection always takes things personally, becoming defensive, and thus never allows us to see or hear things properly. Remember, the most commons signs of rejection are being defensive and taking things personally.
Anthony Hulsebus
#3. There were children playing on the commons. He thought of them as children, though he remembered thinking of himself as an adult at that age. Fifteen, sixteen years old.
James S.A. Corey
#4. If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.
Winston S. Churchill
#5. I do think there is a great deal of caricature around the House of Commons. It is just that kind of place.
Charles Kennedy
#6. I am a child of the House of Commons. I was brought up in my fathers house to believe in democracy. Trust the peoplethat was his message.
Winston Churchill
#7. For when people do not keep watch over the commons, it is destroyed. It results, then, that they fall into civil faction, compelling one another by force and not wishing to do what is just themselves.
Aristotle.
#8. In an approximate way, the logic of commons has been understood for a long time, perhaps since the discovery of agriculture or the invention of private property in real estate.
Garrett Hardin
#9. For however much the state may gain by not having to fund roads on its own, society would lose in aggregate if the open commons of transportation were lost.
Lawrence Lessig
#10. Watching the Commons tribute to Margaret Thatcher was like being suffocated inside a gigantic sticky toffee pudding, but one with nasty bogeys planted inside. There was much of the 'Margaret Thatcher who was lucky enough to know me,' especially from her own side of the House.
Simon Hoggart
#11. It is quite wrong for party conferences to be used as an excuse for the Commons not to sit. Conferences could be held at weekends.
John Bercow
#13. The honest truth is that if this government were to propose the massacre of the first-born, it would still have no difficulty in getting it through the Commons.
Diane Abbott
#14. We walked out of this library building downtown, just on our way to lunch, and I was walking a few steps behind Travolta, and when he opened the door, it was as if Jesus had just walked out into the commons.
Peter Jacobson
#15. There was one path across Boston Commons that a young man must not ask a young woman to take unless he meant business. Which path was that? she asked Holmes. "Ah," she remembered the elderly doctor saying, "if I were only fifty years younger I would show you.
Katherine Paterson
#16. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons.
Garrett Hardin
#17. There is nowhere in the world where sleep is so deep as in the libraries of the House of Commons.
Henry Channon
#18. Thirty resolute men in your House of Commons could save the world.
Felix Frankfurter
#19. I'm still trying to write. I wrote a play a few years ago, so I'm trying to start writing again. The play was called The Commons Of Pensacola. It was at MTC [Manhattan Theatre Club] with Sarah Jessica Parker and Blythe Danner. It was kind of like a riff on Ruth Madoff.
Amanda Peet
#20. No prime minister in Britain will ever be able to go to war without the endorsement of a majority of the House of Commons.
Neil Kinnock
#21. I never aspired to be Speaker simply so I could say, 'I am the Speaker of the House of Commons,' and tell my children that.
John Bercow
#22. As a young man, Dickens worked as a reporter in the House of Commons and hated it. He felt that all politicians spoke with the same voice.
Claire Tomalin
#23. I was in the Commons recently and saw a young lady wearing a nice pair of shoes. I said I liked them and she said my shoes were the reason she became involved in politics.
Theresa May
#24. I. cannot stoop to reply to the folly and the slander of every poor Tory partisan who assails me, and I should not have noticed you but for the fact that you are a member of the House of Commons.
John Bright
#25. I studied politics and economics at Bristol, and people always assumed that I'd go into politics or a non-government organisation when I left. I might well do this later on. I'd love to represent a West Country seat in the House of Commons.
Ben Elliot
#26. If the Internet teaches us anything, it is that great value comes from leaving core resources in a commons, where they're free for people to build upon as they see fit.
Lawrence Lessig
#27. On March 10, 1764, preliminary resolutions passed the House of Commons looking towards the Stamp Act.
Albert Bushnell Hart
#28. The Commons, faithful to their system, remained in a wise and masterly inactivity.
James Mackintosh
#29. A foolish environmentalist wants to save nature from the greed of the market by exposing it to the tragedy of the commons. A smart environmentalist wants to save nature from the tragedy of the commons by exposing it to the greed of the market.
Jakub Bozydar Wisniewski
#30. Show me a first-generatio n fortune and I'll show you a successful partnership between a talented individual and society's invisible venture capitalist, the commons.
William H. Gates, Sr.
#31. We have a maxim in the House of Commons, and written on the walls of our houses, that old ways are the safest and surest ways.
Edward Coke
#32. The House of Commons is called the Lower House, in twenty Acts of Parliament; but what are twenty Acts of Parliament amongst Friends?
John Selden
#33. But there's certainly only one thing I could never agree with George Galloway on. He's a teetotaller and wants to close all the bars in the House of Commons. That is just not on.
Nigel Farage
#34. I can't get very excited about the House of Commons these days because I don't feel the power is there. What is really bizarre is that you sense it is not in Washington either. It is now very hard even to locate the levers of power, let alone to pull them and change things.
Robert Harris
#35. The coming together of the Communications Internet, the Energy Internet, and the Logistics Internet in an Internet of Things provides the cognitive nervous system and physical means to integrate all of humanity in an interconnected global Commons that extends across the entirety of society.
Jeremy Rifkin
#36. I said what do you mean by his country? A flag someone invented two hundred years ago? The Bench of Bishops arguing about divorce and the House of Commons shouting Ya at each other across the floor? Or do you mean the T.U.C. and British Railways and the Co-op?
Graham Greene
#37. We need to start seeing privacy as a commons - as some kind of a public good that can get depleted as too many people treat it carelessly or abandon it too eagerly. What is privacy for? This question needs an urgent answer.
Evgeny Morozov
#38. It's good to remember the unburied dead and the uncollected rubbish. Most of it can now be seen on the Labour benches in the House of Commons.
Norman Tebbit
#39. There's no secret about my ambition, I do not want to go into the House of Commons. My only real political interest is in London and if one day I'm in a position to run for mayor, then terrific.
Trevor Phillips
#40. Jim Sheridan, the MP who wants to ban sketchwriters from the Commons for being rude about politicians, is a blithering idiot. Sorry, scrub that - clearly a very thoughtful person with whom I might conceivably disagree on some marginal issues. A blithering savant, perhaps.
Simon Hoggart
#41. Women have worked hard; starved in prison; given of their time and lives that we might sit in the House of Commons and take part in the legislating of this country.
Ellen Wilkinson
#42. I'm not going to play politics on the floor of the House of Commons.
John Turner
#43. We have been in recess since July, and during that time there have been a fuel crisis, a Danish no vote, the collapse of the Euro and a war in the middle east, but what is our business tomorrow? The Insolvency Bill [Lords]. It ought be called the Bankruptcy Bill [Commons], because we play no role.
Tony Benn
#45. For far too long the House of Commons has been run as little more than a private club by and for gentleman amateurs.
John Bercow
#46. Now that the House of Commons is trying to become useful, it does a great deal of harm.
Oscar Wilde
#47. But first, the news: The House of Commons was sealed off today after police chased an escaped lunatic through the front door during Prime Minister's question time. A spokesman at Scotland Yard said it was like looking for a needle in a haystack.
Ronnie Barker
#48. The government's instinct is to shroud itself in secrecy - to act like the office of a president instead of as a collective cabinet government held to account by the elected House of Commons.
Charles Kennedy
#49. Most Canadians don't understand the House of Commons. They turn on their televisions, see us yelling at one another, and dismiss us as a bunch of fools.
Jean Chretien
#50. I jammed my hand in my jacket pocket, bracing myself fo the next hit, and fel something. Something grainy and samll, sticking to the tips of my fingers: the sand from Commons Park.
Oh Cass, I thought. I miss you so, so much.
Sarah Dessen
#51. 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
#52. It is easy to carp at colleges, and the college, if he will wait for it, will have its own turn. Genius exists there also, but will not answer a call of a committee of the House of Commons. It is rare, precious, eccentric, and darkling.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#53. You can hardly say boo to a goose in the House of Commons now without cries of "Ungentlemanly," "Not fair" and all the rest.
Harold Macmillan
#54. Universities are some of the few places left where a struggle for the commons, for public life, if not democracy itself, can be made visible through the medium of collective voices and social movements energized by the need for a politics and way of life counter to authoritarian capitalism.
Henry Giroux
#55. We are the same. There is no difference anywhere in the world. People are people. They laugh, cry, feel, and love, and music seems to be the commons denomination that brings us all together. Music cuts through all boundaries and goes right to the soul.
Willie Nelson
#56. We think that diamonds are very important, gold is very important, all these minerals are very important. We call them precious minerals, but they are all forms of the soil. But that part of this mineral that is on top, like it is the skin of the earth, that is the most precious of the commons.
Wangari Maathai
#57. The first sign of tyranny is government's complicity in privatizing the commons for private gain.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
#58. But because human being tend to focus on short-term benefits and our own immediate needs, such tragedies of the commons occur frequently .
Dan Ariely
#59. The rise of capitalist practice and morality brought with it a radical revision of how the commons are treated, and also of how they are conceived.
Noam Chomsky
#60. He was a Labour MP so I asked him if it was true the House of Commons was a form of poor relief for the otherwise unemployable...
Robert Robinson
#61. friends of the king can no longer be grip hands with friends of the Commons.
G.A. Henty
#62. A martial nobility and stubborn commons, possessed of arms, tenacious of property, and collected into constitutional assemblies form the only balance capable of preserving a free constitution against the enterprise of an aspiring prince
Edward Gibbon
#63. We are keenly in sympathy with the representatives of Labour. We have too few of them in the House of Commons ... The Liberal party, high and low, have discovered, if they ever forgot it, that the real road to success ... lies in adhering to the old principles of the party.
Henry Campbell-Bannerman
#64. The House Of Commons has never been a tea-party. It consists of strong-minded, often very idealistic people, who are trying to accomplish something for our country. We are inheritors of an adversarial system and that, in itself, fosters conflict.
John Allen Fraser
#65. What the government has to do, if it wants to govern for any length of time, is it must appeal primarily to the third parties in the House of Commons to get them to support it.
Stephen Harper
#66. When I was 14, I told my mother I intended to be in the House of Commons in the morning, in court in the afternoon and on stage in the evening. She realised then a fantasist had been born.
Helen McCrory
#67. 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
#68. None of the threats to the global commons will be solved by building walls.
James G. Stavridis
#69. The Commons is one of the most depressing and intellectually unstimulating places in the country. [On the state of British politics
Clare Short
#70. As far as the environment is concerned, I am becoming pessimistic because I do not see anybody stepping up and taking the long view approach. It seems like we're stuck in a tragedy of the commons where everyone is trying to contribute as little as possible to get out of this situation.
Frans De Waal
#71. In politics, they found there were not enough females in the House of Commons, so they came up with the idea of shortlists having to have women on them.
Gordon Taylor
#72. The prejudice of Englishmen, in favour of their own government by king, lords and commons, arises as much or more from national pride than reason.
Thomas Paine
#73. I am seeking every day to restore faith in Parliament - to ensure we have a House of Commons which is representative, effective and reconnected to the people we serve.
John Bercow
#74. As their forces broke, the Yorkist cavalrymen raced to the horse park behind their own lines and mounted their steeds to give chase. As they thundered past, the King and Warwick, flushed with victory, yelled, 'Spare the commons! Kill the lords!' Their words went unheeded.
Alison Weir
#75. I have never pretended to be a great House of Commons man, but I pay the House the greatest compliment I can by saying that, from first to last, I never stopped fearing it.
Tony Blair
#76. This state of affairs is not inevitable. Humans were able to employ science and law to transform common holdings into a commodity and then into capital; we also have the ability to reverse this path, transforming some of our now overabundant capital into renewed commons.
Fritjof Capra
#77. Really, this horrid House of Commons quite ruins our husbands for us. I think the Lower House by far the greatest blow to a happy married life that there has been since that terrible thing called the Higher Education of Women was invented.
Oscar Wilde
#78. Well, why do you want a political career? Have you ever been in the House of Commons and taken a good square look at the inmates? As weird a gaggle of freaks and sub-humans as was ever collected in one spot.
P.G. Wodehouse
#79. The rational man finds that his share of the cost of the wastes he discharges into the commons is less than the cost of purifying his wastes before releasing them.
Garrett Hardin
#80. Tragedy of the Commons: while each person can agree that all would benefit from common restraint, the incentives of the individuals are arrayed against that outcome.
Clay Shirky
#81. There are more hooligans in the House of Commons than at a football match.
Brian Clough
#82. We cannot afford to be discouraged from challenging the corporate control of our food system, our genetic commons, our shared resources, or our democracy. The history of social change in our nation shows that the political system can be reformed, even if the road is long and zigzag.
Wenonah Hauter
#83. They say that the commons of England would first destroy the king's friends and afterward himself, and then bring the Duke of York to be king so that by their false means and lies they may make him to hate and destroy his friends, and cherish his false traitors.
Jack Cade
#84. There's a lot of people I've encouraged and helped to get into the House of Commons. Looking at them now, I'm not so sure it was a wise thing to do.
Edward Heath
#85. No man is regular in his attendance at the House of Commons until he is married.
Benjamin Disraeli
#86. Protecting Americans from harm goes beyond police and national defense. It's imperative that we not destroy the commons, the physical environment on which we rely.
Kevin O'Leary
#87. If ever I left the House of Commons it would be because I wanted to spend more time on politics.
Tony Benn
#88. 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
#89. The House of Commons starts its proceedings with a prayer. The chaplain looks at the assembled members with their varied intelligence and then prays for the country.
Alfred Denning, Baron Denning
#90. Only people who look dull ever get into the House of Commons, and only people who are dull ever succeed there.
Oscar Wilde
#91. Using the commons as a cesspool does not harm the general public under frontier conditions, because there is no public, the same behavior in a metropolis is unbearable.
Garrett Hardin
#92. When I first came to the House of Commons and walked out into the lobby, men sprang to their feet. I asked them to sit down since I'd come to walk around. I didn't want them doing me favours.
Agnes Macphail
#93. Churchill was in the lavatory in the House of Commons and his secretary knocked on the door and said: Excuse me Prime Minister, but the Lord Privy Seal wishes to speak to you. After a pause Churchill replied: Tell His Lordship: I'm sealed on The Privy and can only deal with one shit at a time
Winston S. Churchill
#95. Scientific knowledge scarcely exists amongst the higher classes of society. The discussion in the Houses of Lords or of Commons, which arise on the occurrence of any subjects connected with science, sufficiently prove this fact ...
Charles Babbage
#96. An anarcho-capitalist is someone who agrees that the best way to eliminate the tragedy of the commons is to privatize it away, and realizes that state politics is the mother of all such tragedies.
Jakub Bozydar Wisniewski
#97. Smiling, I cut across the quadrangle toward the commons. I felt better about life than I had in a very long time. We could do this, Lissa and me. We could do this together.
Richelle Mead
#98. 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
#99. Elections exist for the sake of the House of Commons and not the House of Commons for the sake of elections.
Winston Churchill
#100. Until the late-nineteenth-century the House of Commons maintained a formal ban on the reporting of its debates.
Clive Ponting
