An ambassador is not simply an agent; he is also a spectacle.

Capital must be propelled by self-interest; it cannot be enticed by benevolence.

So long as war is the main business of nations, temporary despotism - despotism during the campaign - is indispensable.

The mystic reverence, the religious allegiance, which are essential to a true monarchy, are imaginative sentiments that no legislature can manufacture in any people.

No great work has ever been produced except after a long interval of still and musing meditation.

Progress would not have been the rarity it is if the early food had not been the late poison.

Business is really more agreeable than pleasure; it interests the whole mind, the aggregate nature of man more continuously, and more deeply. But it does not look as if it did.