Great Throughts Treasury

"In the faculty of writing nonsense, stupidity is no match for genius."

"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."

"It is an inevitable defect, that bureaucrats will care more for routine than for results."

"It is often said that men are ruled by their imaginations; but it would be truer to say they are governed by the weakness of their imaginations."

"Its mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic."

"Life is a school of probability"

"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"

"Men who do not make advances to women are apt to become victims to women who make advances to them."

"Money is economic power."

"Most men of business think Anyhow this system will probably last my time. It has gone on a long time, and is likely to go on still."

"No great work has ever been produced except after a long interval of still and musing meditation."

"Nations touch at their summits."

"No man has come so near our definition of a constitutional statesman - the powers of a first-rate man and the creed of a second-rate man."

"No real English gentleman, in his secret soul, was ever sorry for the death of a political economist."

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

"Open-mindedness should not be fostered because, as Scripture teaches, Truth is great and will prevail, nor because, as Milton suggests, Truth will always win in a free and open encounter. It should be fostered for its own sake."

"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."

"Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not."

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

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

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

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

"Speak of the gods as they are."

"The apparent rulers of the English nation are like the imposing personages of a splendid procession: it is by them the mob are influenced; it is they whom the spectators cheer. The real rulers are secreted in second-rate carriages; no one cares for them or asks after them, but they are obeyed implicitly and unconsciously by reason of the splendor of those who eclipsed and preceded them."

"The beginning of civilization is marked by an intense legality; that legality is the very condition of its existence, the bond which ties it together; but that legality - that tendency to impose a settled customary yoke upon all men and all actions -"

"The being without an opinion is so painful to human nature that most people will leap to a hasty opinion rather than undergo it."

"The best history is but like the art of Rembrandt; it casts a vivid light on certain selected causes, on those which were best and greatest; it leaves all the rest in shadow and unseen."

"The best reason why monarchy is a strong government is that it is an intelligible government: the mass of mankind understand it, and they hardly anywhere in the world understand any other."

"The caucus is a sort of representative meeting which sits voting and voting till they have cut out all the known men against whom much is to be said, and agreed on some unknown man against whom there is nothing known, and therefore nothing to be alleged."

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

"The Ethiop gods have Ethiop lips, Bronze cheeks, and woolly hair; The Grecian gods are like the Greeks, As keen-eyed, cold and fair."

"The great difficulty which history records is not that of the first step, but that of the second step. What is most evident is not the difficulty of getting a fixed law, but getting out of a fixed law; not of cementing (as upon a former occasion I phrased it) a cake of custom, but of breaking the cake of custom; not of making the first preservative habit, but of breaking through it, and reaching something better."

"The greatest enjoyment possible to man was that which this philosophy promises its votaries—the pleasure of being always right, and always reasoning—without ever being bound to look at anything."

"The greatest mistake is trying to be more agreeable than you can be."

"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."

"The less money lying idle the greater is the dividend."

"The most intellectual of men are moved quite as much by the circumstances which they are used to as by their own will. The active voluntary part of a man is very small, and if it were not economized by a sleepy kind of habit, its results would be null."

"The most melancholy of human reflections, perhaps, is that, on the whole, it is a question whether the benevolence of mankind does most good or harm."

"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 name ‘London Banker’ had especially a charmed value. He was supposed to represent, and often did represent, a certain union of pecuniary sagacity and educated refinement which was scarcely to be found in any other part of society."

"The notion of a farseeing and despotic statesman, who can lay down plans for ages yet unborn, is a fancy generated by the pride of the human intellect to which facts give no support."

"The purse strings tie us to our kind."

"The real essence of work is concentrated energy."

"The reason why so few good books are written is, that so few people that can write know anything. In general an author has always lived in a room, has read books, has cultivated science, is acquainted with the style and sentiments of the best authors, but he is out of the way of employing his own eyes and ears. He has nothing to hear and nothing to see. His life is a vacuum."

"The Sovereign has, under a constitutional monarchy such as ours, three rights -- the right to be consulted, the right to encourage, the right to warn. And a king of great sense and sagacity would want no others."

"To a great experience one thing is essential — an experiencing nature."

"Under a cabinet constitution at a sudden emergency this people can choose a ruler for the occasion. It is quite possible and even likely that he would not be ruler before the occasion. The great qualities, the imperious will, the rapid energy, the eager nature fit for a great crisis are not required — are impediments — in common times. A Lord Liverpool is better in everyday politics than a Chatham — a Louis Philippe far better than a Napoleon. By the structure of the world we want, at the sudden occurrence of a grave tempest, to change the helmsman — to replace the pilot of the calm by the pilot of the storm."

"Under a Presidential government, a nation has, except at the electing moment, no influence; it has not the ballot-box before it; its virtue is gone, and it must wait till its instant of despotism again returns."

"War both needs and generates certain virtues; not the highest, but what may be called the preliminary virtues, as valor, veracity, the spirit of obedience, the habit of discipline. Any of these, and of others like them, when possessed by a nation, and no matter how generated, will give them a military advantage, and make them more likely to stay in the race of nations."

"We must not let daylight in upon the magic."