Politics and Power

The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse.

Kings will be tyrants from policy when subjects are rebels from principle.

In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows.

Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants.

A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.

Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together.

To tax and to please, no more than to love and to be wise, is not given to men.

It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact; and great trade will always be attended with considerable abuses.

It is a general popular error to imagine the loudest complainers for the public to be the most anxious for its welfare.

Those who have been once intoxicated with power, and have derived any kind of emolument from it, even though for but one year, can never willingly abandon it.

Beneath the rule of men entirely great

The whore and gambler, by the State

The strongest poison ever known

That the king can do no wrong, is a necessary and fundamental principle of the English constitution.

The royal navy of England hath ever been its greatest defence and ornament; it is its ancient and natural strength; the floating bulwark of the island.

The king never dies.

I do not regard the procuring of peace as a matter in which we should play the role of arbiter between different opinions … more that of an honest broker who really wants to press the business forward.

This policy cannot succeed through speeches, and shooting-matches, and songs; it can only be carried out through blood and iron.

Whoever speaks of Europe is wrong, [it is] a geographical concept.

Politics is the art of the possible.

We will not go to Canossa.

The secret of politics? Make a good treaty with Russia.

CONSERVATIVE , n . A statesman who is enamoured of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.

HISTORY , n . An account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.