Your friends praise your abilities to the skies, submit to you in argument, and seem to have the greatest deference for you; but, though they may ask it, you never find them following your advice upon their own affairs; nor allowing you to manage your own, without thinking that you should follow theirs. Thus, in fact, they all think themselves wiser than you, whatever they may say.

God help the Minister that meddles with art!

That is no use at all. What I want is men who will support me when I am in the wrong.

The whole duty of government is to prevent crime and to preserve contracts.

I wish I was as cocksure of anything as Tom Macaulay is of everything.

A doctrinaire is a fool but an honest man.

It is not much matter which we say, but mind, we must all say the same.

You should never assume contempt for that which it is not very manifest that you have it in your power to possess, nor does a wit ever make a more contemptible figure than when, in attempting satire, he shows that he does not understand that which he would make the subject of his ridicule.