Frederick Halsey
Overview
 
Sir Thomas Frederick Halsey, 1st Baronet PC
Privy Council of the United Kingdom
Her Majesty's Most Honourable Privy Council, usually known simply as the Privy Council, is a formal body of advisers to the Sovereign in the United Kingdom...

 (9 December 1839 – 12 February 1927) was an English
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

  Conservative Party
Conservative Party (UK)
The Conservative Party, formally the Conservative and Unionist Party, is a centre-right political party in the United Kingdom that adheres to the philosophies of conservatism and British unionism. It is the largest political party in the UK, and is currently the largest single party in the House...

 politician who sat in the House of Commons from 1874 to 1906.

Halsey came from one of the most prominent families of Hertfordshire
Hertfordshire
Hertfordshire is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in the East region of England. The county town is Hertford.The county is one of the Home Counties and lies inland, bordered by Greater London , Buckinghamshire , Bedfordshire , Cambridgeshire and...

, whose seat was at Gaddesden Place
Gaddesden Place
Gaddesden Place, near Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire, England, was designed by architect James Wyatt and built between 1768 and 1773, and was the home of the noted Hertfordshire Halsey family....

, near Hemel Hempstead
Hemel Hempstead
Hemel Hempstead is a town in Hertfordshire in the East of England, to the north west of London and part of the Greater London Urban Area. The population at the 2001 Census was 81,143 ....

. He was the son of Thomas Plumer Halsey
Thomas Plumer Halsey
Thomas Plumer Halsey MP was a Member of Parliament for Hertfordshire from 1846 to 1854.He was the son of Joseph Thompson Whately Thomas Plumer Halsey MP (26 January 1815 – 24 April 1854) was a Member of Parliament for Hertfordshire from 1846 to 1854.He was the son of Joseph Thompson Whately Thomas...

 and his wife Frederica Johnston, daughter of General F. Johnston. His father was Member of Parliament
Member of Parliament
A Member of Parliament is a representative of the voters to a :parliament. In many countries with bicameral parliaments, the term applies specifically to members of the lower house, as upper houses often have a different title, such as senate, and thus also have different titles for its members,...

 (MP) for Hertfordshire
Hertfordshire (UK Parliament constituency)
Hertfordshire was a county constituency covering the county of Hertfordshire in England. It returned two Knights of the Shire to the House of Commons of England until 1707, then to the House of Commons of Great Britain until 1800, and to the House of Commons of the Parliament of the United Kingdom...

 from 1847 until he was drowned with his wife and his younger son in the shipwreck of the steamer Ercolano in the Gulf of Genoa
Gulf of Genoa
The Gulf of Genoa is the northernmost part of the Ligurian Sea. The width of the gulf is about 125 km, from the city of Imperia in the west to La Spezia in the east. The largest city on the its coast is Genoa, which has an important port....

 on 24 April 1854.
Quotations

Admiration for a quality or an art can be so strong that it deters us from striving to possess it.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Mixed Opinions and Maxims, aphorism 370, “The Danger in Admiration,” (1879).

It is the quality of the moment, not the number of days, or events, or of actors, that imports.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Speech, January 1842, at the Masonic Temple in Boston, repr. in The Dial (1843) and Nature, Addresses, and Lectures (1849).

It’s the quality of the ordinary, the straight, the square, that accounts for the great stability and success of our nation. It’s a quality to be proud of. But it’s a quality that many people seem to have neglected.

Gerald Ford, Time Magazine|Time (January 28, 1974)

Much of what passes for quality on British television is no more than a reflection of the narrow elite which controls it and has always thought that its tastes were synonymous with quality.

Rupert Murdoch, Address, 1989, to the Edinburgh Television Festival. quoted in Guardian (London, Jan. 1, 1990).

One cannot develop taste from what is of average quality but only from the very best.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Conversations with Eckermann (February 26, 1824).

One shining quality lends a lustre to another, or hides some glaring defect.

William Hazlitt, Complete Works, vol. 9, ed. P.P. Howe (1932). Characteristics, no. 162 (first published anonymously in 1823).

People of quality know everything without ever having learned anything.

Molière, Les Précieuses Ridicules, sc. 9 (1659).

So cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can’t fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.

William S. Burroughs, The Western Lands, ch. 2 (1987).

Social improvement is attained more readily by a concern with the quality of results than with the purity of motives.

Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition, aph. 25 (1973).

The measure of your quality as a public person, as a citizen, is the gap between what you do and what you say.

Ramsey Clark, International Herald Tribune (Paris, June 18, 1991).

 
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