Talk ought always to run obliquely, not nose to nose with no chance of mental escape.

Fill an author with a titanic fame and you do not make him titanic; you often merely burst him.

Persecution was at least a sign of personal interest.

By rights, satire is a lonely and introspective occupation, for nobody can describe a fool to the life without much patient self-inspection.

There ought to be some sign in a book about man, that the writer knows thoroughly one man at least.

Politics is a place of humble hopes and strangely modest requirements, where all are good who are not criminal and all are wise who are not ridiculously otherwise.

In middle life politics are not a mental acquisition; they are a temperament.