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.

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.

It is good to be without vices, but it is not good to be without temptations.

The apparent rulers of the English nation are like the most imposing personages of the a splendid procession; it is by them that the mob are influenced; it is they who the inspectors cheer. The real rulers are secreted in second hand carriages; no one cares for them or asks about them, but they are obeyed implicitly and unconsciously by reason of the splendour of those who eclipsed and preceded them.

A princely marriage is the brilliant edition of a universal fact, and, as such, it rivets mankind.

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

The purse strings tie us to our kind.