Benjamin Disraeli - Coningsby (1844)

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We owe the English peerage to three sources: the spoliation of the Church; the open and flagrant sale of honours by the elder Stuarts; and the borough-mongering of our own time.

Benjamin Disraeli
A machine is a slave that neither brings nor bears degradation.

Benjamin Disraeli
Man is only truly great when he acts from the passions; never irresistible but when he appeals to the imagination.

Benjamin Disraeli
The mystery of mysteries is to view machines making machines.

Benjamin Disraeli
You never observe a great intellectual movement in Europe in which the
Jews do NOT greatly participate. The first Jesuits were Jews.

Benjamin Disraeli
The age does not believe in great men, because it does not possess any.

Benjamin Disraeli
What wonderful things are events! The least are of greater importance than the most sublime and comprehensive speculations.

Benjamin Disraeli
A machine is a slave that neither brings nor bears degradation.

Benjamin Disraeli
What Art was to the ancient world, Science is to the modern...

Benjamin Disraeli
The mystery of mysteries is to view machines making machines; a spectacle that fills the mind with curious, and even awful, speculation.

Benjamin Disraeli
Youth is a blunder; Manhood a struggle; Old Age a regret.

Benjamin Disraeli
A government of statesmen or of clerks? Of Humbug or Humdrum?

Benjamin Disraeli
The affections are the children of ignorance; when the horizon of our experience expands, and models multiply, love and admiration imperceptibly vanish.

Benjamin Disraeli
Conservatism discards Prescription, shrinks from Principle, disavows Progress; having rejected all respect for antiquity, it offers no redress for the present, and makes no preparation for the future.

Benjamin Disraeli
A great city, whose image dwells in the memory of man, is the type of some great idea. Rome represents conquest; Faith hovers over the towers of Jerusalem; and Athens embodies the pre-eminent quality of the antique world, Art.

Benjamin Disraeli
No Government can be long secure without a formidable Opposition.

Benjamin Disraeli
The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.

Benjamin Disraeli
Life is too short to be little. Man is never so manly as when he feels deeply, acts boldly, and expresses himself with frankness and with fervor.

Benjamin Disraeli
What art was to the ancient world, Science is to the modern; the distinctive faculty. In the minds of men, the useful has succeeded to the beautiful.

Benjamin Disraeli
'A sound Conservative government,' said Taper, musingly. 'I understand: Tory men and Whig measures.'

Benjamin Disraeli
I have been ever of opinion that revolutions are not to be evaded.

Benjamin Disraeli
Fame and power are the objects of all men. Even their partial fruition is gained by very few; and that, too, at the expense of social pleasure, health, conscience, life.

Benjamin Disraeli
He had lived long enough to know that it is unwise to wish everything explained.

Benjamin Disraeli
You must possess at the same time the habit of communicating and the habit of listening. The union is rather rare, but irresistible.

Benjamin Disraeli
It seems to me a barren thing this Conservatism—an unhappy cross-breed, the mule of politics that engenders nothing.

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

Benjamin Disraeli
All of us encounter, at least once in our life, some individual who utters words that make us think forever. There are men whose phrases are oracles; who can condense in one sentence the secrets of life; who blurt out an aphorism that forms a character, or illustrates an existence.

Benjamin Disraeli
The House of Commons is absolute. It is the State. 'L'État c'est moi.'

Benjamin Disraeli