So long as there are earnest believers in the world, they will always wish to punish opinions, even if their judgment tells them it is unwise and their conscience that it is wrong.

A severe though not unfriendly critic of our institutions said that the cure for admiring the House of Lords was to go and look at it.

The real essence of work is concentrated energy - people who really have that in a superior degree by nature are independent of the forms and habits and artifices by which less able and less active people are kept up to their labors.

No real English gentleman, in his secret soul, was ever sorry for the death of a political economist.

A slight daily unconscious luxury is hardly ever wanting to the dwellers in civilization; like the gentle air of a genial climate, it is a perpetual minute enjoyment.

The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.

One cannot make men good by Act of Parliament.