[ To Edward Bulwer-Lytton :] Damn your principles! Stick to your party.

[ Correcting proofs of his last parliamentary speech, 31 Mar. 1881 :] I will not go down to posterity talking bad grammar.

[ Replying to anti-Semitic taunting in the House of Commons :] Yes, I am a Jew! When the ancestors of the honorable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple!

[ To an author who had sent him an unsolicited manuscript :] Many thanks; I shall lose no time in reading it.

[ On his deathbed, declining a visit from Queen Victoria :] No it is better not. She would only ask me to take a message to Albert.

[ On becoming prime minister in 1868 :] I have climbed to the top of the greasy pole.

[ Of attacks in Parliament :] Never complain and never explain.

[ Of William E. Gladstone :] A sophistical rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity, and gifted with an egotistical imagination that can at all times command an interminable and inconsistent series of arguments to malign an opponent and to glorify himself.

[ Of the Treasury Bench :] You behold a range of exhausted volcanoes.

Finality is not the language of politics.