With the dead there is no rivalry, with the dead there is no change.

The perfect disinterestedness and self-devotion of which men seem incapable, but which is sometimes found in women.

It has often been found that profuse expenditures, heavy taxation, absurd commercial restrictions, corrupt tribunals, disastrous wars, seditions, persecutions, conflagrations, inundation, have not been able to destroy capital so fast as the exertions of private citizens have been able to create it.

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.

I would rather be poor in a cottage full of books than a king without the desire to read.

We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.

We hardly know an instance of the strength and weakness of human nature so striking and so grotesque as the character of this haughty, vigilant, resolute, sagacious blue-stocking, half Mithridates and half Trissotin, bearing up against a world in arms, with an ounce of poison in one pocket and a quire of bad verses in the other.