Clergyman's

If we yield now to the TUC we shall never be able to call our bodies or souls or intelligences our own.
- Ramsay MacDonald

The desolation of loneliness is terrible. Was I wise? Perhaps not, but it seemed as though anything else was impossible.
- Ramsay MacDonald

Unemployment cannot be cured by relief work nor by patchwork of any kind. We must develop national resources and improve trade so that there will be increased employment and a tremendous revolution in industry and in power by the use of electricity and petrol, which must be accompanied by reorganisation of transport, including the making of roads, the reconditioning of railway plant and equipment, an extension of pensions which must enable the more aged workers to retire, the raising of the school age with necessary maintenance grants. We must dam the influx of premature people into industry.
- Ramsay MacDonald

We will endeavour to unite the whole country in opposing French aggression. ... We cannot stand by and allow the resources of Germany to be deteriorated by French action. The British occupation of the Rhine, if it is part of the French policy, cannot be allowed to continue.
- Ramsay MacDonald

with something higher and wider than trade union industrial demands. It must set these demands into a system of national well-being; the wage earner must become the citizen: the union must become the guardian of economic justice.
- Ramsay MacDonald

We are going to Geneva determined, by persuasion, by arguments, by appeals to what has been written, appeals to measures already taken, appeals to history, appeals to common sense, to get the nations of the world to join in and reduce this enormous, disgraceful burden of armaments which we are now bearing from one end of the world to the other.
- Ramsay MacDonald

The end we have to strive for is complete democratic liberty in politics and complete freedom in industry from the tyranny of monopoly and the vagaries of capitalism. Or, employing words appropriate to the spirit of Socialism, we should say that the task of the practical democratic reformer is now to show how the work of democratic liberty, begun so well by the early Radicals but dropped by their modern representatives, is to be completed; how the golden bridge of palliatives between political and social democracy is to be built; and how the foundations of social democracy are to be laid.
- Ramsay MacDonald

Factory Laws, Fair Wages resolutions, Trade Unionism itself, are...all Protection - not the Protection of Mr. Chaplin, the landlord, nor of Mr. Chamberlain, the demagogue, but the Protection of the Socialist.
- Ramsay MacDonald