Royalty is a government in which the attention of the nation is concentrated on one person doing interesting actions.

A Parliament is nothing less than a big meeting of more or less idle people.

Adventure is the life of commerce, but caution is the life of banking.

Persecution in intellectual countries produces a superficial conformity, but also underneath an intense, incessant, implacable doubt.

Our law very often reminds one of those outskirts of cities where you cannot for a long time tell how the streets come to wind about in so capricious and serpent-like a manner. At last it strikes you that they grew up, house by house, on the devious tracks of the old green lanes; and if you follow on to the existing fields, you may often find the change half complete.

An influential member of parliament has not only to pay much money to become such, and to give time and labour, he has also to sacrifice his mind too - at least all the characteristics part of it that which is original and most his own.

The cure for admiring the House of Lords is to go and look at it.