Top 564 Quotes & Sayings by Benjamin Disraeli - Page 2
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a British celebrity Benjamin Disraeli.
Last updated on April 14, 2025.
Next to knowing when to seize an opportunity, the most important thing in life is to know when to forego an advantage.
You will find as you grow older that courage is the rarest of all qualities to be found in public life.
Finality is not the language of politics.
Time is precious, but truth is more precious than time.
The very phrase 'foreign affairs' makes an Englishman convinced that I am about to treat of subjects with which he has no concern.
There is no act of treachery or meanness of which a political party is not capable; for in politics there is no honour.
We should never lose an occasion. Opportunity is more powerful even than conquerors and prophets.
The first magic of love is our ignorance that it can ever end.
To supervise people, you must either surpass them in their accomplishments or despise them.
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.
In a progressive country change is constant; change is inevitable.
My idea of an agreeable person is a person who agrees with me.
He was distinguished for ignorance; for he had only one idea, and that was wrong.
There is no waste of time in life like that of making explanations.
There is no greater index of character so sure as the voice.
Mediocrity can talk, but it is for genius to observe.
London is a roost for every bird.
I must follow the people. Am I not their leader?
Great countries are those that produce great people.
The right honourable gentleman caught the Whigs bathing, and walked away with their clothes. He has left them in the full enjoyment of their liberal positions, and he is himself a strict conservative of their garments.
A consistent soul believes in destiny, a capricious one in chance.
Nine-tenths of the existing books are nonsense and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.
Desperation is sometimes as powerful an inspirer as genius.
Travel teaches toleration.
Without publicity there can be no public support, and without public support every nation must decay.
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.
It is easier to be critical than correct.
My objection to Liberalism is this that it is the introduction into the practical business of life of the highest kind namely, politics of philosophical ideas instead of political principles.
Real politics are the possession and distribution of power.
Increased means and increased leisure are the two civilizers of man.
Despair is the conclusion of fools.
The governments of the present day have to deal not merely with other governments, with emperors, kings and ministers, but also with the secret societies which have everywhere their unscrupulous agents, and can at the last moment upset all the governments' plans.
Colonies do not cease to be colonies because they are independent.
London is a modern Babylon.
There is no index of character so sure as the voice.
Let the fear of a danger be a spur to prevent it; he that fears not, gives advantage to the danger.
How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.
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.
Plagiarists, at least, have the merit of preservation.
We moralize among ruins.
There is moderation even in excess.
The practice of politics in the East may be defined by one word: dissimulation.
We cannot learn men from books.
The wisdom of the wise and the experience of the ages are perpetuated by quotations.
Grief is the agony of an instant; the indulgence of grief the blunder of a life.
Beware of endeavoring to become a great man in a hurry. One such attempt in ten thousand may succeed. These are fearful odds.
Every production of genius must be the production of enthusiasm.
In politics nothing is contemptible.
No man is regular in his attendance at the House of Commons until he is married.
What we anticipate seldom occurs: but what we least expect generally happens.
A man may speak very well in the House of Commons, and fail very completely in the House of Lords. There are two distinct styles requisite: I intend, in the course of my career, if I have time, to give a specimen of both.
The services in wartime are fit only for desperadoes, but in peace are only fit for fools.
There is no gambling like politics.
Assassination has never changed the history of the world.
The best security for civilization is the dwelling, and upon properly appointed and becoming dwellings depends, more than anything else, the improvement of mankind.
Talk to a man about himself and he will listen for hours.
The Youth of a Nation are the trustees of posterity.
Nationality is the miracle of political independence; race is the principle of physical analogy.
The secret of success in life is for a man to be ready for his opportunity when it comes.
The pursuit of science leads only to the insoluble.
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