Efficiency in an assembly requires a solid mass of steady votes; and these are collected by a deferential attachment to particular men, or by a belief in the principles that those men represent, and they are maintained by fear of those men - by the fear that if you vote against them, you may soon yourself have no vote at all.

Nothing is more unpleasant than a virtuous person with a mean mind.

Money is economic power.

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

The habit of common and continuous speech is a symptom of mental deficiency. It proceeds from not knowing what is going on in other people's minds.

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

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.