My duty is clear and at all costs will be done.
John Burns
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John Burns quotes
Apart from the merits of the case it is my especial duty to dissociate myself, and the principles I hold and the trusteeship for the working classes I carry from such a universal crime as the contemplated war will be.
Books are a real solace, friendships are good but action is better than all.
Conquering himself, he has learned that he can conquer the world of capital whose generals have been the most ruthless of his oppressors.
Don't hustle old people.
For my part I have two eyes which I make use of, one fixed on the ground on the lookout for practical things immediately realisable, the other looking upward - toward the ideal.
For the moment and for some time great events have been denied me, forward action not come my way.
I am depressed rather at the wave of brutality sweeping over the country.
I am not ashamed to say that I am the son of a washerwoman.
I am only doing now what I have ever done; and ever will continue to do - that is adapting past experience to present reform in the light of high ideals and future objects.
I believe the proper business of a Municipality is to do for the individual merged in the mass what the individual cannot do so well alone.
I believe, however, that impending events will call us and we must respond but where, with whom, and how?
I don't want boys to buy cigarettes.
I don't want boys to use bad language.
I don't want boys to use their pencils for improper writing.
I must firmly adhere to the views I have held and practice, that Socialism to succeed must be practical, tolerant, cohesive and consciously compromising with Progressive forces running, if not so far, in parallel lines towards its own goal.
I neither drink nor smoke, because my schoolmaster impressed upon me three cardinal virtues; cleanliness in person, cleanliness in mind; temperance.
I recognise that Socialism has ended its purely theoretical course, and that the hour to construct has come.
I want the municipality to be a helping hand to the man with a desire of sympathy, to help the fallen when it is not in their power to help themselves.
If you visited Iraq over the past 15 years, as I did, you observed the terrible psychological as well as physical bludgeoning of the Iraqi people by Saddam Hussein, one expression of which was an unwillingness, a kind of alienation from any sense of self-expression or self-assertion.
Impatience with serious grievance, resistance to solid injustice, revolt even against intolerable wrong certainly but the revolutionary spirit is now evoked and responded to in matters that disciplined patience for a short period would resist and a contemptuous indifference could dispose of.
In this work I have received the opposition of a number of men who only advocate the unobtainable because the immediately possible is beyond their moral courage, administrative ability, and their political prescience.
Individual effort is almost relatively impossible to cope with the big problem of poverty as we see it.
Judge men less by the labels they wear than by their persistent labour for sure if slow progress.
My duty is clear and at all costs will be done.
Remember the match girls who won their strike and formed a union; take courage from the gas stokers who only a few weeks ago won the eight hour day.
Still more important perhaps, is the fact that labour of the humbler kind has shown its capacity to organise itself; its solidarity; its ability.
The Gentlemen of England serve under the greatest cad in Europe.
The labourer has learned that combination can lead him to anything and everything.
The men who made the war were profuse in their praises of the man who kicked the P.M. out of his office and now degrades by his disloyal, dishonest and lying presence the greatest office in the State.
The recent I.L.P. conference from which I had expected some change in methods and tactics has confirmed my previous views of its leaders.
The Thames is liquid history.
We go in for progressive reforms.
When I have to mount a staircase I climb up step by step. If I want to go up ten stairs at a time I break my neck - and that is not my intention.
Why four great powers should fight over Serbia no fellow can understand.
You come before me this morning with clean hands and clean collars. I want you to have clean tongues, clean manners, clean morals and clean characters.
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