I wish I was as sure of anything as he is of everything.

In after-life you may have friends--fond, dear friends; but never will you have again the inexpressible love and gentleness lavished upon you which none but a mother bestows.

No particular man is necessary to the state. We may depend on it that, if we provide the country with popular institutions, those institutions will provide it with great men.

The object of oratory alone in not truth, but persuasion.

All the walks of literature are infested with mendicants for fame, who attempt to excite our interest by exhibiting all the distortions of their intellects and stripping the covering from all the putrid sores of their feelings.

He [Charles II] was utterly without ambition. He detested business, and would sooner have abdicated his crown than have undergone the trouble of really directing the administration.

Byron owed the vast influence which he exercised over his contemporaries at least as much to his gloomy egotism as to the real power of his poetry.