Benjamin Disraeli Quotes

328 Sourced Quotes

No Government can be long secure without a formidable Opposition.

Benjamin Disraeli
I admit that there is gossip…But the government of the world is carried on by sovereigns and statesmen, and not by anonymous paragraph writers…or by the hare-brained chatter of irresponsible frivolity.

Benjamin Disraeli
King Louis Philippe once said to me that he attributed the great success of the British nation in political life to their talking politics after dinner.

Benjamin Disraeli
Yes, I am a Jew, and when the ancestors of the right honorable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon.

Benjamin Disraeli
Scientific, like spiritual truth, has ever from the beginning been descending from heaven to man.

Benjamin Disraeli
I have always felt that the best security for civilisation is the dwelling, and that upon properly appointed and becoming dwellings depends more than anything else the improvement of mankind. Such dwellings are the nursery of all domestic virtues, and without a becoming home the exercise of those virtues is impossible.

Benjamin Disraeli
When Gentlemen cease to be returned to Parliament this Empire will perish.

Benjamin Disraeli
What, then, was that policy? It was a policy of conditional neutrality. Under the circumstances of the case we did not believe that it was for the honour or interest of England or Turkey that we should take any part in the impending contest; but while we enforced the neutrality which we prepared to observe, we declared at the same time that that neutrality must cease if British interests were assailed or menaced. Cosmopolitan critics, men who are the friends of every country save their own, have denounced this policy as a selfish policy. My Lord Mayor, it is as selfish as patriotism.

Benjamin Disraeli
The press is not only free, it is powerful. That power is ours. It is the proudest that man can enjoy. It was not granted by monarchs, it was not gained for us by aristocracies ; but it sprang from the people, and, with an immortal instinct, it has always worked for the people.

Benjamin Disraeli
The eyes of the social herd, who always observe little things, and generally form from them their opinions of great affairs.

Benjamin Disraeli
Had it not been for you, I should have remained what I was when we first met, a prejudiced, narrow-minded being, with contracted sympathies and false knowledge, wasting my life on obsolete trifles, and utterly insensible to the privilege of living in this wondrous age of change and progress.

Benjamin Disraeli
Nationality is the miracle of political independence; race is the principle of physical analogy.

Benjamin Disraeli
As men advance in life, all passions resolve themselves into money. Love, ambition, even poetry, end in this.

Benjamin Disraeli
That is the fourth course, which in future I trust the right hon. Gentleman (Sir R. Peel) will not forget. The right hon. Gentleman tells us to go back to precedents; with him a great measure is always founded on a small precedent. He traces the steam-engine always back to the tea-kettle. His precedents are generally tea-kettle precedents.

Benjamin Disraeli
Posterity will do justice to that unprincipled maniac Gladstone—extraordinary mixture of envy, vindictiveness, hypocrisy and superstition; and with one commanding characteristic—whether Prime Minister or Leader of the Opposition, whether preaching, praying, speechifying or scribbling—never a gentleman.

Benjamin Disraeli
What appear to be calamities are often the sources of fortune.

Benjamin Disraeli
At present the peace of the world has been preserved, not by statesmen, but by capitalists.

Benjamin Disraeli
That is an apology, not an explanation; and apologies only account for that which they do not alter.

Benjamin Disraeli
It [the revelation of chaos] is treated scientifically; everything is explained by geology and astronomy, and in that way. It shows you exactly how a star is formed; nothing can be so pretty! A cluster of vapour, the cream of the milky way, a sort of celestial cheese, churned into light,

Benjamin Disraeli
Without dancing you can never attain a perfectly graceful carriage, which is of the highest importance in life.

Benjamin Disraeli
Is it what you call civilization that makes England flourish? Is it the universal development of the faculties of man that has rendered an island, almost unknown to the ancients, the
arbiter of the world? Clearly not. It is the inhabitants that have done this. It is an affair of race.... All is race, there is no other truth.

Benjamin Disraeli
Those authors who appear sometimes to forget they are writers, and remember they are men, will be our favorites.

Benjamin Disraeli
It is the fashion to style the present moment an extraordinary crisis.

Benjamin Disraeli
Progress to what and from where…The European talks of progress because by an ingenious application of some scientific acquirements he has established a society which has mistaken comfort for civilization.

Benjamin Disraeli
A want of tact is worse than a want of virtue. Some women, it is said, work on pretty well without the last: I never knew one who did not sink, who ever dared to sail without the other.

Benjamin Disraeli