The House Of Commons Quotes

#1. If ever I left the House of Commons it would be because I wanted to spend more time on politics.

Tony Benn

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. There are more hooligans in the House of Commons than at a football match.

Brian Clough

#12. 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

#13. No man is regular in his attendance at the House of Commons until he is married.

Benjamin Disraeli

#14. I do think there is a great deal of caricature around the House of Commons. It is just that kind of place.

Charles Kennedy

#15. 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

#16. Only people who look dull ever get into the House of Commons, and only people who are dull ever succeed there.

Oscar Wilde

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. Elections exist for the sake of the House of Commons and not the House of Commons for the sake of elections.

Winston Churchill

#21. Until the late-nineteenth-century the House of Commons maintained a formal ban on the reporting of its debates.

Clive Ponting

#22. [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

#23. The food in the House of Commons is fairly good. The cafe in Portcullis House is really very high quality, and you also have a choice of eating in the more traditional restaurants, the Churchill Room or the Members' Dining Room. I don't often eat in them, though, as I'm usually on the run.

Vince Cable

#24. Anybody who enjoys being in the House of Commons probably needs psychiatric help.

Ken Livingstone

#25. There is no more striking illustration of the immobility of British institutions than the House of Commons. Herbert

H. H. Asquith

#26. 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

#27. If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.

Winston S. Churchill

#28. 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

#29. There is nowhere in the world where sleep is so deep as in the libraries of the House of Commons.

Henry Channon

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. On March 10, 1764, preliminary resolutions passed the House of Commons looking towards the Stamp Act.

Albert Bushnell Hart

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. Now that the House of Commons is trying to become useful, it does a great deal of harm.

Oscar Wilde

#43. 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

#44. I'm not going to play politics on the floor of the House of Commons.

John Turner

#45. 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

#46. 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

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. 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

#50. 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

#51. Thirty resolute men in your House of Commons could save the world.

Felix Frankfurter

#52. 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

#53. 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

#54. 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

#55. 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

#56. 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