Quotes to inspire and reflect

His Christianity was muscular.

As for our majority … one is enough.

With words we govern men.

Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.

It seems to me a barren thing this Conservatism—an unhappy cross-breed, the mule of politics that engenders nothing.

Youth is a blunder; Manhood a struggle; Old Age a regret.

‘A sound Conservative government,’ said Taper, musingly. ‘I understand: Tory men and Whig measures.’

No Government can be long secure without a formidable Opposition.

A sophistical rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity.

I will not go down to posterity talking bad grammar.

Lord Salisbury and myself have brought you back peace—but a peace I hope with honour.

Cosmopolitan critics, men who are the friends of every country save their own.

Upon the education of the people of this country the fate of this country depends.

A University should be a place of light, of liberty, and of learning.

Increased means and increased leisure are the two civilizers of man.

You behold a range of exhausted volcanoes. of the Treasury Bench

Assassination has never changed the history of the world.

Change is inevitable in a progressive country. Change is constant.

Justice is truth in action.

Is man an ape or an angel? Now I am on the side of the angels.

The Continent will [not] suffer England to be the workshop of the world.

A Conservative Government is an organized hypocrisy.

Fancy being remembered around the world for the invention of a mouse!

Though I sit down now, the time will come when you will hear me.

L’esprit de l’escalier.

When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble.

This is my letter to the world

And [with] the guts of the last priest

They shut me up in prose—

There’s a certain Slant of light,

Success is counted sweetest

The Soul selects her own Society—

Parting is all we know of heaven,

There interposed a Fly—

Heaven is what I cannot reach

There is no Frigate like a Book

Since then—’tis Centuries—and yet

Because I could not stop for Death—

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.

Poverty and oysters always seem to go together.

Minerva House … where some twenty girls … acquired a smattering of everything, and a knowledge of nothing.

I wants to make your flesh creep.

‘It’s always best on these occasions to do what the mob do.’ ‘But suppose there are two mobs?’ suggested Mr Snodgrass. ‘Shout with the largest,’ replied Mr Pickwick.

He had used the word in its Pickwickian sense … He had merely considered him a humbug in a Pickwickian point of view.

Kent, sir—everybody knows Kent—apples, cherries, hops, and women.

There is a passion for hunting something deeply implanted in the human breast.

‘If the law supposes that,’ said Mr Bumble … ‘the law is a ass—a idiot.’