Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Diffused knowledge immortalizes itself.
Whatever is popular deserves attention.
The frivolous work of polished idleness.
Maxims are the condensed good sense of nations.
Men are never so good or so bad as their opinions.
The wealth of society is its stock of productive labor.
It is right to be contented with what we have, never with what we are.
I have long believed that women should play a much bigger part in our affairs.
The Commons, faithful to their system, remained in a wise and masterly inactivity.
The powers of a man's mind are directly proportional to the quantity of coffee he drank.
We shall experience the final defeat of liberalism not when immigration but when emigration is forbidden
A vice utterly at variance with the happiness of him who harbors it, and, as such, condemned by self-love.
Those who differ most from the opinions of their fellow men are the most confident of the truth of their own.
Our long-term objective is clear: to replace the Labour Party as the progressive wing of politics in this country.
Praise is the symbol which represents sympathy, and which the mind insensibly substitutes for its recollection and language.
All the poison that my Hon. friend (Edwina Currie) suggests I would happily take rather than be spread eagled on the floor of the House by her.
The trouble with the Labour Party is that they don't really believe in Socialism, but they cannot wholeheartedly approve of private enterprise either.
The feminine graces of Madame de Sevigne's genius are exquisitely charming; but the philosophy and eloquence of Madame de Stael are above the distinction of sex.
(I must tell my Hon. Friend Miss Janet Fookes) that although I have always been attracted to her I have never actually dared ask her whether she would go to bed with me.
It is not because we have been free, but because we have a right to be free, that we ought to demand freedom. Justice and liberty have neither birth nor race, youth nor age.
Those who preached faith, or in other words a pure mind, have always produced more popular virtue than those who preached good acts, or the mere regulation of outward works.
In bygone days, commanders were taught that when in doubt, they should march their troops towards the sound of gunfire. I intend to march my troops towards the sound of gunfire.
Every fiction since Homer has taught friendship, patriotism, generosity, contempt of death. These are the highest virtues; and the fictions which taught them were therefore of the highest, though not of unmixed, utility.
The state owned monopolies are among the greatest millstones round the neck of the economy. Liberals must stress at all times the virtues of the market, not only for efficiency but to enable the widest possible choice. Much of what Mrs Thatcher and Sir Keith Joseph say and do is in the mainstream of liberal philosophy.
After listening to the debate on unemployment I can see a danger that Liberals lose to the Tories their claim to have new and sensible ideas and are left saying "Me too" to a Socialist conventional wisdom which is failing. The salient need of this country to produce more and much more efficiently hardly figured on the agenda.
A gentleman who for reasons of chivalry I shall not mention, but who occupied grand office, and who had taken grandly of wine and allowed veritas to overcome him, went up to the Prime Minister and told her he had always fancied her, to which the Prime Minister replied, "Quite right - you have very good taste but I just don't think you would make it at the moment.