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

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.

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.

What we opprobriously call stupidity, though not an enlivening quality in common society, is nature's favorite resource for preserving steadiness of conduct and consistency of opinion.

Life is a school of probability.

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

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.