Kindle Notes & Highlights
Apparently, during the years of his climb, he read much and judiciously. One contemporary described him as an encyclopedia, from whose stores everyone received instruction.
“You could not stand five minutes with that man beneath a shed while it rained, but you must be convinced you had been standing with the greatest man you had ever yet seen.”
We may debate his views and his motives, but we can never doubt his courage.
“Never do today what you can put off till tomorrow, nor ever do yourself what you can get anyone else to do for you.”
“I am as thick one way as the other.”
Fox remarked that the greatest pleasure in life, next to winning, was losing.
he “threw himself into the middle of his sentences,” said the scholar Richard Porson, “and left it to God Almighty to get him out again.”
Burke called him “not a chip of the old block but the old block itself.”
he could buy, but he could not be bought.
There, as “the Mad Monks of Medmenham,” they caricatured Roman Catholic rites by celebrating a “Black Mass” to Satan, and indulging their profane and Priapean bent.
When Sandwich told Wilkes that he would die either on the gallows or from venereal disease, Wilkes answered, “That depends, my Lord, on whether I embrace your principles or your mistress.”
They are the trustees, not the owners, of the estate.
Having sold the nation in gross, they will undoubtedly protect you in the detail, for while they patronize your crimes, they feel for their own.
“Sir, it is the misfortune of your life … that you should never have been acquainted with the language of truth until you heard it in the complaints of your people. It is not, however, too late to correct the error of your education.”
“The Prince, while he plumes himself upon the security of his title to the crown, should remember that as it was acquired by one revolution, it may be lost by another.”
Some advance toward democracy was inevitable now that political information and intelligence were more widely spread.
The new freedom, like most liberties, was frequently abused.
In its turn it had to be chastened by a fourth voice, public opinion, of which, however, the press was partly the source, often the seducer, sometimes the voice.
Montesquieu had predicted this in 1730, even to specifying that the break would be caused by British restrictions on American trade.
War, Burke mourned, “is indeed become a substitute for commerce. … Great orders for provisions and stores of all kinds … keep up the spirits of the mercantile world, and induce them to consider the American war not so much their calamity as their resource.”
“But yesterday, and England might have stood against the world; now none so poor to do her reverence.”
In any case Burke was what conservatives had longed for in vain throughout the Age of Reason—a man who could defend custom as brilliantly as Voltaire had defended reason.
“In every society,” said Adam Smith, “where the distinction of ranks has once been completely established, there have always been two different schemes or systems of morality current at the same time; of which one may be called the strict or austere, the other the liberal, or, if you will, the loose system. The former is generally admired and revered by the common people, the latter … more esteemed and adopted by what are called people of fashion.”
“whatever now is established, once was innovation”;
“Under a government of laws, what is the motto of a good citizen? To obey punctually, to censure freely
In the last resort, revolution may do less damage to the state than a dulling submission to tyranny.
Bentham was the last voice of the Enlightenment, the bridge between the liberating thought of the eighteenth century and the reforms of the nineteenth.
When he died (June 6, 1832), aged eighty-four, he willed that his body should be dissected in the presence of his friends.
“That young man never had his equal, and he will never have a rival.”
He appreciated money, and tempered his choice of plays to the greatest happiness of the greatest paying number.
“When a man is tired of London he is tired of life.”
THIS England loved great music, but could not produce it.
they seemed converted to Burke’s theory that in art, as in life, beauty must be frail.
diai gynaikon, goddesses among women,
“labor is the only price of solid fame.”
“every opportunity should be taken to discountenance that false and vulgar opinion—that rules are the fetters of genius.”
for the romantic spirit, unless it is religious, is helpless in the face of death.
Justice is not only blind, it limps.
Smith’s work “would persuade the present generation and govern the next.”
“I have a genius for paternity,”
“I love you to distraction, and will love you to eternity.”6
“Good historians,” Walpole wrote to one of them, Robertson, “are the most scarce of all writers, and no wonder! A good style is not very common; thorough information is still more rare; and if these meet, what a chance that impartiality should be added to them!”
“it is more tremendous than I imagined; the great speakers fill me with despair, the bad ones with terror”;
He that can swim needs not despair to fly;
He explained the habit of smoking as “preserving the mind from utter vacuity.”
He would not believe that any man was happy; of one who claimed to be so he said, “It is all cant; the dog knows he is miserable all the time.”
“Johnson has a roughness in his manner, but no man alive has a more tender heart. He has nothing of the bear but the skin.”
“a man who loves to fold his legs and have out his talk.”
He was always tempted to oppose what another had said; he was ready to defend any proposition or its opposite; he relished debate, knowing himself invincible; and he was resolved to win the argument, even if truth should perish beneath his blows. He knew that this was not the finest kind of conversation, but he was sure that it was the most interesting. In the heat and zest of the conflict he found little place for courtesy.
What will posterity think of us when it reads what an idol we adored?
