The purse strings tie us to our kind.

A great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.

You may talk of the tyranny of Nero and Tiberius; but the real tyranny is the tyranny of your next-door neighbor.

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.

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.

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.

Nothing is more unpleasant than a virtuous person with a mean mind.

One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.

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.

A Parliament is nothing less than a big meeting of more or less idle people.

You’re not mending anything, remember, Sand? The hedge.” He paused and shook his head at himself. “And Perrotte’s away for a few minutes, and you’re talking to yourself again.

Fear least have power! The power of fear lies in the power of our fears. Without the power of our fears, fear is least empowered!

Your destiny is calling on you to surround yourself with people who see moving forward as the only option in life.

Crime is naught but misdirected energy.

I'm of the opinion that poetry is always political, and cannot help but be so, regardless of the poet's intent, given that refusing to deal in politics is in itself a political act.

Great writers arrive among us like new diseases - threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.

We all die and disappear, but that's because the mechanism of the world itself is built on destruction and loss.

The blood of Christ is necessary to purge the faults clinging to our best works.

In society one needs a flexible virtue; too much goodness can be blamable.

You know when civilization began? With the invention of the mirror.