If you can once engage people's pride, love, pity, ambition on your side, you need not fear what their reason can do against you.

If you are not in fashion, you are nobody.

I look upon indolence as a sort of suicide.

I would rather have a young fellow too much than too little dressed; the excess on that side will wear off, with a little age and reflection; but if he is negligent at twenty, he will be a sloven at forty, and stink at fifty years old. Dress yourself fine where others are fine, and plain where others are plain; but take care always that your clothes are well made and fit you, for otherwise they will give you a very awkward air.

Arbitrary power has seldom... been introduced in any country at once. It must be introduced by slow degrees, and as it were step by step.

Never write down your speeches beforehand; if you do, you may perhaps be a good declaimer, but will never be a debater.

Dispatch is the soul of business, and nothing contributes more to dispatch than method.