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.
A slight daily unconscious luxury is hardly ever wanting to the dwellers in civilization; like the gentle air of a genial climate, it is a perpetual minute enjoyment.
Persecution in intellectual countries produces a superficial conformity, but also underneath an intense, incessant, implacable doubt.
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.
We think of Euclid as of fine ice; we admire Newton as we admire the peak of Teneriffe. Even the intensest labors, the most remote triumphs of the abstract intellect, seem to carry us into a region different from our own-to be in a terra incognita of pure reasoning, to cast a chill on human glory.
Go ahead and do the impossible. It’s worth the look on the faces of those who said you couldn’t.
Every banker knows that if he has to prove he is worthy of credit, in fact his credit is gone.
Adventure is the life of commerce, but caution is the life of banking.
To a great experience one thing is essential, an experiencing nature.
In the faculty of writing nonsense, stupidity is no match for genius.
Women – one half the human race at least – care fifty times more for a marriage than a ministry.
But of all nations in the world the English are perhaps the least a nation of pure philosophers.
Capital must be propelled by self-interest; it cannot be enticed by benevolence.
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.
The characteristic merit of the English constitutions is, that its dignified parts are very complicated and somewhat imposing, very old and rather venerable, while its efficient part, at least when in great and critical action, is decidedly simple and modern.
You may talk of the tyranny of Nero and Tiberius; but the real tyranny is the tyranny of your next-door neighbor.
One cannot make men good by Act of Parliament.
What we opprobriously call stupidity, though not an enlivening quality in common society, is nature’s favorite resource for preserving steadiness of conduct and consistency of opinion.
The business of banking ought to be simple. If it is hard it is wrong. The only securities which a banker, using money that he may be asked at short notice to repay, ought to touch, are those which are easily saleable and easily intelligible.
The best security for people’s doing their duty is that they should not know anything else to do.