David Alton’s Maiden Speech, House of Commons 3 April 1979:

“Five days ago the people of Edge Hill decided to reject the old ways. They gave a massive thumbs down sign to both the other parties. I believe that that happened because people are frustrated and cynical about the way in which politicians have let them down. People of my generation are angry about the way in which the establishment parties have forgotten what service means and have forgotten about the way in which people should see and hear from their elected representative.”

“The bullet can never replace the ballot in a free society.”

“If you can’t afford the blankets on the bed, you don’t have the piano french-polished. If politics is about priorities, surely it means putting first things first and dealing with basic amenities and services, not spending money on grandiose pie in the sky dreams which will become taxpayers’ nightmares.”

Lord Alton’s Maiden Speech House of Lords 22 October 1997

“Along with my own children I have both British and Irish passports. Why? Because love of country need not imply a hatred of another country. In common with millions of others who draw on the diversity and strength of the British and Irish traditions I would add my voice as an encouragement to the Government as they painstakingly work for an end to sectarianism.

July 10th 1979 House of Commons Speech opposing the proposed £40 million Liverpool inner ring road and demolition programme (which led to censure by the Commons Speaker, George Thomas):

“Parts of the road were to be 10 lanes wide, and it was responsible for the decimation of homes and businesses alike. During that decade our city lost more than 70,000 people as a direct result of redevelopment plans. These plans ripped and tore the heart out of the city, created barren wastes, and shanghaied people to places they did not know and did not want to go to. And all for what? A decision taken in the early 1970s by the same group of dedicated megalomaniacs and lunatics led to the abandonment of this road that had led to nowhere.

“Those who argue in its favour say that the city needs the road, but I believe that Liverpool needs it about as much as a goldfish needs a folding bicycle.

“How can this road-bulding be justified while people still live in homes without inside toilets and bathrooms? The last census showed that in Edge Hill there were more people without inside toilets in their homes than in any other town in England. How can this road be justified while children in the city of Liverpool still attend schools that were built in the nineteenth century, and while our environment still bears scars left since the Second World War?

“The chairman of the Merseyside county council is said to keep in his drawer 433 a photograph of Adolf Hitler. At any rate, that is what he said in the local newspaper. Perhaps that is where he derives his megalomaniac delusions from. Certainly he is trying to finish off the job that Hitler started in wrecking and ruining the city of Liverpool.

“The construction of the road must be seen against the background of public expenditure cuts and the energy crisis. It must also be seen in the context of Liverpool’s inner city problems and their possible solution.

“Yesterday the … Association of County Councils issued a press release detailing a package of what it called ” revolutionary ideas “. If one accepts that revolution is bred out of disillusionment, cynicism and rebellion against measures that are basically repressive, the ACC’s ideas could be called revolutionary. It talks of delaying fire protection in elderly people’s homes and stopping the pocket money given to them; charging for nursery school education and further education; stopping free school milk, stopping subsidies for school meals, and reducing nutriment in those meals; repealing consumer protection legislation because it costs too much, and abandoning public participation in planning for the same reason.

“Yet at the same time as all these things are happening the Merseyside County Council… is embarking on the construction of a £40 million monstrosity known as the Liverpool inner ring road dreamed up in the 1960s by planners and politicians whose eyes were bigger than their pockets…

July 1979 The Whiston baby case (baby aborted at Whiston hospital and baptised by nurses):

“I would like to add a supplementary question to that just raised by the hon. Member for Pontypool (Mr. Abse). The Minister said earlier that there had been public concern about the whole question whether it would be possible for a foetus to survive at, say, 19 weeks. Indeed, the incident at the Whiston hospital was a clear demonstration of that public concern. At the Minister’s request, I asked that his reply to my questions on that subject should be reported in the Official Report, and that was done.

But I was concerned that the Minister was not prepared to publish the whole of the report that was submitted to him by the area health authority. I should have thought that it might have answered many of the concerns and the genuine feelings of resentment and anger that exist in the Whiston area, especially among some of the staff who were involved in that incident if they had been able to get sight of the report that was submitted to the Minister. It seems to me also that hon. Members have been denied the opportunity of judging for themselves the information submitted.

The people concerned maintain that that foetus was capable of life. They saw it not only moving but making noises as well which resembled those of a newly born child, and because of that they had genuine concern. Would the Minister reconsider his decision and make available to hon. Members copies of the report of the investigations by the area health authority in that instance?”

 

2010 – Vienna Forum:

“In post-modern Britain we have lost our national identity. In part, this is because we have no common story to bind us together; and because we have tried to commit collective amnesia about those parts of the story which may make us feel uncomfortable”

“The trend in Britain has been towards a very narrow and ideological form of secularisation. This encourages the suppression of all religious belief or the fostering of comparative religion – that is the belief of nobody, taught by anybody and paid for by everybody, but, on no account, please don’t teach us what you really believe. This is a nonsensical merry-go-round.”

“Knowledge without values, and without a common story, is a disaster: and nor should we seek to hide behind the pretext of tolerance.”

“Tolerance should never be presented as a substitute for conviction. It is not a belief in itself. If it requires everyone to give up their religious beliefs – or the right to wear a cross or celebrate a religious festival – because such characteristics make the non-believer uncomfortable, it in turn becomes a form of intellectual fascism.”

“Being socially inclusive then is not like Jonah in the whale or the chicken in the fox – it’s not about forcing a Christian, Jew or Muslim to give up their beliefs to accommodate those who have none. Inclusion is different from ingestion. It is not about enforced conformity. Just because some have lost the faith of their fathers, we do not need to lose the faith of ours.”

“For myself, despite its manifest failings, give me Britain’s hobbled democracy any day if the alternative is a society in which adulterers are flogged, gays are executed, women are stoned for not being veiled, churches are burned, so-called apostates are killed and non-Muslims are forced to convert or be treated as ‘dhimmis’ or second-class citizens.”

“A few years ago, I was travelling in Israel and the Palestinian West Bank leading a group of pilgrims. We were drawn from seven different denominations. As we left the town of Jericho we saw a lorry over turn on the road ahead of us. The lorry’s load of fruit was scattered over the road and the Palestinian driver, who had fallen asleep, was badly injured and thrown out of his cab. Ironically, it was on this road that Jesus chose to set his story of the Good Samaritan who stopped to help the Jewish traveller who had been set upon by thieves.

“From our air conditioned coach stepped forth a young German born catholic doctor. She lived in Liverpool. With her was a nurse from Leigh who is a member of the Brethren. I don’t suppose that mattered much to the driver, a Muslim, who desperately needed help. A little later some Jewish Israeli paramedics arrived and lifted the man to safety and took him away to hospital.

“Muslim, Jewish, Christian. Humanity is at its best when reaching out to others; When we lose sight of the human being made in the image of God and substitute hatred or enmity, we succumb to evil, we diminish ourselves and we make the world a little crazier. By contrast, endless cycles of revenge are no way to live. When you go on taking an eye for an eye the whole world ends up blind.”

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“The root of universal human rights is universal respect for human beings. We can all do something about that.”
James Mawdsley

“The prolife cause is the pre-eminent cause of our time, and this struggle between the gospel of life and the culture of death will determine the destiny of mankind.” Peter Garrett, LIFE

“when sorrows come, they come not single spies but in battalions.” – Claudius in Hamlet.

“The just man justices” Gerard Manley Hopkins.

“It seems to me as clear as daylight that abortion would be a crime.” Gandhi

“Those who love stay awake when duty calls, wake up from sleep when someone needs help; those who love keep burning, no matter what, like a lighted torch. Those who love take on anything, complete goals, bring plans to fruition … But those who do not love faint and lie down on the job.” – Thomas a Kempis

William Wilberforce on introducing the legislation to end the slave trade: “We can no longer plead ignorance. We cannot turn aside.”

“The relationship between friends is more intimate than that between brothers; therefore friends call each other ‘brothers’ and the closest of brothers are ‘friends.’Friendship surpasses kinship only in this respect: kin need not love reciprocally; friends must. In fact relations of kinship remain even without love between the kin; but if you take away mutual love between friends, how can the essence of friendship subsist?” Matteo Ricci SJ

“The love of power must be replaced by the power to love.” – W.E.Gladstone.

“To kill one person is murder, but a million is statistics” – Stalin

“One human soul is worth all the railroads in Italy” -Pius -IX

“I have often said that man’s unhappiness springs from one thing alone, his incapacity to stay quietly in one room” – Pascal

Josef Haydn: “a secret voice within me whispered, “There are but few contented, happy peoples here below; everywhere grief and care prevail; perhaps your labours may one day be the source from which the weary and worn, or the man burdened with affairs, may derive a few moments’ rest and refreshment.”

- “Elected silence, sing to me, and beat upon my whorled ear, Pipe me to pastures still and be, The music that I care to hear.” (Psalm 23 – pipe me to pastures still). – Gerard Manley Hopkins “Habit of Perfection”

- “our past is the capital of life” – Edmund Burke

- A plot in Middlesex is worth an acre in utopia – McAuley

The most important knowledge is knowledge of our own inadequacies

“Cirmcumstances rule men, men do not rule circumstances” – Herodotus

“Nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on,” said President Lincoln. This is the essential meaning of our Declaration of Independence, that God has created all of us equal and bestowed us with “certain unalienable rights,” the foremost among them the right to life.

John Maynard Keynes once said “I would like to warn the gentlemen of the City and High Finance that if they do not listen in time to the voice of reason their days may be numbered. I speak to this great city as Jonah spoke to Ninevah…. I prophesy that unless they embrace wisdom in good time, the system upon which they live will work so very ill that they will be overwhelmed by irresistible things which they will hate much more than the mild and limited remedies offered them now…”

“No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.”

E.F. Schumacher – “ Infinite growth of material consumption in a finite world is an impossibility.”

“A nation that kills its own children is a nation without hope.” -Blessed John Paul II

“They dwell in their own countries but simply as sojourners. As citizens, they share in all things with others, and yet endure all things as if foreigners. Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers. They marry, as do others; they beget children; but they do not destroy their offspring. They have a common table but not a common bed. They are in the flesh, but they do not live after the flesh. They pass their days on the earth, but are citizens of heaven. They obey the prescribed laws, and at the same time surpass the laws in their lives. They love all, and are persecuted by all. They are poor, yet they make many rich; they are completely destitute, and yet they enjoy complete abundance. They are reviled, and yet they bless. When they do good they are punished as evildoers; undergoing punishment, they rejoice because they are brought to life.”
Epistle to Diognetus, author unknown (Written about AD 130, this is one of the earliest descriptions of Christians).

“ The only thing that we now have to say is, that if our religion do make us traitors, we are worthy to be condemned; but otherwise are and have been, as good subjects as ever the Queen had. In condemning us, you condemn all your own ancestors, all our ancient bishops and kings, all that was once the glory of England — the island of saints, and the most devoted child of the See of Peter.
“God lives; posterity will live; their judgement is not so liable to corruption as that of those who are now going to sentence us to death.” – St.Edmund Campion, 1581, speaking in Westminster Hall before his execution at Tyburn.

“The State is not an abstract entity. It acts and suffers only as those individual agents through whose actions the functions of the state are discharged act and suffer. And it is their actions that conform to or violate norms and values…. the state is just or unjust, protective to those whom it ought to protect, and scrupulous or unscrupulous in its dealings with other states, only insofar as the relevant individual persons have these characteristics.” – St.Edith Stein before being taken by the Nazis to Auschwitz.

“No one in the world can change Truth. What we can do and should do is to seek truth and to serve it when we have found it. The real conflict is the inner conflict. Beyond armies of occupation and the hecatombs of extermination camps, there are two irreconcilable enemies in the depth of every soul: good and evil, sin and love. And what use are the victories on the battlefield if we ourselves are defeated in our
innermost personal selves?” – St.Maximilian Kolbe, who was executed at Auschwitz by the Nazis.

“The Church cannot and must not remain on the sidelines in the fight for justice….The promotion of justice through efforts to bring about openness of mind and will to the demands of the common good is something which concerns the Church deeply… Abject poverty is an offence against human dignity.”
- Pope Benedict XVI

“A state which is not governed by justice is just a bunch of thieves.” – St.Augustine of Hippo

: “A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault.” – Bl.John Henry Newman

“We are not born for ourselves , but for our kind, for our neighbours, for our country: it is but selfishness, indolence, a perverse fastidiousness, an unmanliness, and no virtue or praise, to bury our talent in a napkin” – Bl.John Henry Newman

“God has created me to do Him some definite service. He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission. I may never know it in this life but I shall be told it in the next. I am a link in a chain; a bond of connection between persons; He has not created me for naught. I shall do good – I shall do His work. I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place, while not intending it, if I do but keep His commandments. Therefore I will trust Him whatever I am, I can never be thrown away If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him, in perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him. If I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve Him. He does nothing in vain. He knows what he is about. He may take away my friends. He may throw me among strangers. He may make me feel desolate, make my spirits sink, hide my future from me – still He knows what He is about.”- Bl.John Henry Newman

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Ronald Reagan “no arsenal or no weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and courage of free men and women.”

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Thomas a Kempis:

“Love is a mighty power,
a great and complete good.
Love alone lightens every burden, and makes rough places smooth.
It bears every hardship as though it were nothing, and renders
all bitterness sweet and acceptable.”

“Nothing is sweeter than love,
Nothing stronger,
Nothing higher,
Nothing wider,
Nothing more pleasant,
Nothing fuller or better in heaven or earth; for love is born of God”
Although he believes that ultimately “man proposes, but God disposes” this is not to be read as an excuse for shrugging off our responsibility to act.
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Thomas a Kempis : “At the Day of Judgement we shall not be asked what we have read, but what we have done…..Those who love stay awake when duty calls, wake up from sleep when someone needs help; those who love keep burning, no matter what, like a lighted torch. Those who love take on anything, complete goals, bring plans to fruition … But those who do not love faint and lie down on the job.”
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Thomas a Kempis: “It is great maturity and wisdom to think nothing of ourselves, and to think always well and highly of others.”
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Jean Rostand, the French biologist, said: “For my part I believe that there is no life so degraded, debased, deteriorated, or impoverished that it does not deserve respect and is not worth defending with zeal and conviction.

I have the weakness to believe that it is an honour for our society to desire the expensive luxury of sustaining life for its useless, incompetent and incurably ill members. I would almost measure society’s degree of civilisation by the amount of effort and vigilance it imposes on itself out of pure respect for life.”

Promise me you’ll always remember:
You’re braver than you believe,
and stronger than you seem,
and smarter than you think.
— Christopher Robin to Pooh

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Parliamentary Speeches and Interventions: 1979 – 2005