A system in which the two great commandments are to hate your neighbor and to love your neighbor's wife.

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.

As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.

A church is disaffected when it is persecuted, quiet when it is tolerated, and actively loyal when it is favored and cherished.

Books are becoming everything to me. If I had at this moment any choice in life, I would bury myself in one of those immense libraries...and never pass a waking hour without a book before me.

The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm.

There is no country in Europe which is so easy to over-run as Spain; there is no country which it is more difficult to conquer.