Benjamin Disraeli

When asked about belief in God, he replied that he believed what most intelligent men believed. When asked what that was, he said, 'like most intelligent men I don't say.'

Bore: one who has the power of speech but not the capacity for conversation.

As a general rule, nobody has money who ought to have it.

It destroys one's nerves to be amiable every day to the same human being.

If Gladstone fell in the Thames, that would be a misfortune. But if someone fished him out again, that would be a calamity.

Wherever is found what is called a paternal government, there is found state education. It has been discovered that the best way to insure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery.

The poor are very well off, at least the agricultural poor, very well off indeed. Their incomes are certain, that is a great point, and they have no cares, no anxieties; they always have a resource, they always have the House. People without cares do not require as much food as those whose life entails anxieties. See how long they live!

I feel a very unusual sensation - if it is not indigestion, I think it must be gratitude.

Every woman should marry ... and no man.

I believe that nothing in newspapers is ever true. And that is why they are so popular; the taste of the age being so decidedly for fiction.

I cannot pay attention unless I am attracted.

The secret history of the late distress is a lesson to all modern statesmen. Rest assured that in politics, however tremendous the effects, the causes are often as trifling.

An English revolution is at least a solemn sacrifice: a French revolution is an indecent massacre.

It was a melancholy day for human nature when that stupid Lord Anson, after beating about for three years, found himself again at Greenwich. The circumnavigation of our globe was accomplished, but the illimitable was annihilated and a fatal blow [dealt] to all imagination.

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

A conservative government is an organized hypocrisy.

My mind is a continental mind. It is a revolutionary mind.

Books are fatal: they are the curse of the human race. Nine-tenths of existing books are nonsense, and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense. The greatest misfortune that ever befell man was the invention of printing.

Why should one say that the machine does not live? It breathes, for its breath forms the atmosphere of some towns.

Never mind that; we came at last. And at the next change there will be something very superior to us—something with wings. Ah! That's it: we were fishes, and I believe we shall be crows.