Benjamin Disraeli … the liberal PM …

Success is the child of audacity. The secret of success is constancy to purpose. Desperation is sometimes as powerful an inspirer as genius. Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.

Diligence is the mother of good fortune. Through perseverance many people win success out of what seemed destined to be certain failure. Little things affect little minds. Nurture your minds with great thoughts. To believe in the heroic makes heroes.

There is no greater index of character so sure as the voice.

There can be effeciency only where there is economy. Talk to a man about himself and he will listen for hours.

Be amusing: never tell unkind stories; above all, never tell long ones. Never complain, never explain. The wisdom of the wise and the experience of the ages are perpetuated by quotations. Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.

Mediocrity can talk, but it is for genius to observe. Change is inevitable. Change is constant. But characters do not change. Opinions alter, but characters are only developed. Silence is the mother of truth. Without tact you can learn nothing.

The choicest pleasures of life lie within the ring of moderation. Teach us that wealth is not elegance, that profusion is not magnificence, that splendor is not beauty. The palace is not safe when the cottage is not happy.

Two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones,or inhabitants of different planets – the rich and the poor.

Worry – a God, invisible but omnipotent. It steals the bloom from the cheek and lightness from the pulse; it takes away the appetite, and turns the hair gray.

Where knowledge ends, religion begins. The art of governing mankind is by deceiving them. No man is regular in his attendance at the House of Commons until he is married. The services in wartime are fit only for desperadoes, but in peace are only fit for fools.

If Gladstone fell into the Thames, that would be a misfortune; and if anybody pulled him out, that I suppose would be a calamity.

Benjamin Disraeli (1804 – 1881). A successful novelist he was the only person of Jewish origin to become Conservative Prime Minister and that too twice. His maiden speech, not to mention his costume, was so gaudy, so affected that he was laughed off the floor of the House. “You shall hear me!”, he shouted before sitting down. Within a decade he was so smooth, so colloquial, so wittily malicious that the House hung on his words. The rivalry between Disraeli and Gladstone was not only political, but also personal. Disraeli said that GOM (which stood for Grand Old Man, Gladstones nickname) really stood for God’s Only Mistake.