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

Royalty is a government in which the attention of the nation is concentrated on one person doing interesting actions. A Republic is a government in which that attention is divided between many, who are all doing uninteresting actions. Accordingly, so long as the human heart is strong and the human reason weak, Royalty will be strong because it appeals to diffused feeling, and Republics weak because they appeal to the understanding.

The purse strings tie us to our kind.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Women--one half the human race at least--care fifty times more for a marriage than a ministry.

The most essential mental quality for a free people, whose liberty is to be progressive, permanent and on a large scale, is much stupidity.

But of all nations in the world the English are perhaps the least a nation of pure philosophers.