William Ewart Gladstone

Good laws make it easier to do right and harder to do wrong.

Here is my first principle of foreign policy: good government at home.

Men are apt to mistake the strength of their feeling for the strength of their argument. The heated mind resents the chill touch and relentless scrutiny of logic.

If you are cold, tea will warm you; if you are too heated, it will cool you; If you are depressed, it will cheer you; If you are excited, it will calm you.

Failure is success if we learn from it.

Justice delayed is justice denied.

Excess in Apparel is another costly Folly. The very Trimming of the vain World would cloath all the naked one.

All schools, all colleges, have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal, valuable knowledge. The theological knowledge which they conceal cannot justly be regarded as less valuable than that which they reveal. That is, when a man is buying a basket of strawberries it can profit him to know that the bottom half of it is rotten.

We have a problem. Congratulations. But it’s a tough problem. Then double congratulations.

Things alter for the worse spontaneously, if they be not altered for the better designedly.

Beauty rests on necessities.

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.

A man’s house burns down. The smoking wreckage represents only a ruined home that was dear through years of use and pleasant associations. By and by, as the days and weeks go on, first he misses this, then that, then the other thing. And when he casts about for it he finds that it was in that house. Always it is an essential – there was but one of its kind. It cannot be replaced. It was in that house. It is irrevocably lost. It will be years before the tale of lost essentials is complete, and not till then can he truly know the magnitude of his disaster.

When you cannot get a compliment in any other way pay yourself one.

You have such strong words at command, that they make the smallest argument seem formidable.

Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit.

Work is always an antidote to depression.

The perception of the comic is a tie of sympathy with other men, a pledge of sanity, and a protection from those perverse tendencies and gloomy insanities in which fine intellects sometimes lose themselves. A rogue alive to the ludicrous is still convertible. If that sense is lost, his fellow-men can do little for him.

Defeat in itself was part and parcel of the great gambling game of politics. A man who could not accept it and try again was not of the stuff of which leaders are made.

Not even the Devil can call a woman “Slut” if he is not able to make her fall in love.

Americans adore me and will go on adoring me until I say something nice about them.