Poverty is an anomaly to rich people; it is very difficult to make out why people who want dinner do not ring the bell.

Nine tenths of modern science is in this respect the same: it is the produce of men whom their contemporaries thought dreamers - who were laughed at for caring for what did not concern them - who, as the proverb went, 'walked into a well from looking at the stars' - who were believed to be useless, if anyone could be such.

Conquest is the missionary of valor, and the hard impact of military virtues beats meanness out of the world.

Life is not a set campaign, but an irregular work, and the main forces in it are not overt resolutions, but latent and half-involuntary promptings.

The great pleasure of life is doing for pleasure things I do not like to do.

It has been said that England invented the phrase, 'Her Majesty's Opposition'; that it was the first government which made a criticism of administration as much a part of the polity as administration itself. This critical opposition is the consequence of cabinet government.

The purse strings tie us to our kind.