Taste, if it mean anything but a paltry connoisseurship, must mean a general susceptibility to truth and nobleness, a sense to discern, and a heart to love and reverence all beauty, order, goodness, wheresoever, or in whatsoever forms and accompaniments they are to be seen. This surely implies, as its chief condition, not any given external rank or situation, but a finely-gifted mind, purified into harmony with itself, into keenness and justness of vision; above all, kindled into love and generous admiration.

Is man’s civilization only a wrappage, through which the savage nature of him can still burst, infernal as ever?

Let me have my own way in exactly everything and a sunnier and pleasanter creature does not exist.

The Orator persuades and carries all with him, he knows not how; the Rhetorician can prove that he ought to have persuaded and carried all with him.

That monstrous tuberosity of civilised life, the capital of England.

Fancy that thou deservest to be hangedthou wilt feel it happiness to be only shot: fancy that thou deservest to be hanged ina hair halter, it will be a luxury to die in hemp.

Democracy will prevail when men believe the vote of Judas as good as that of Jesus Christ.