Top 100 Disraeli's Quotes: Famous Quotes & Sayings About Disraeli's

#1. I have always been averse to theorizing about the art or craft of biography. Like Disraeli's biographer, Lord Blake, who offers the cautionary analogy of the biographical centipede unsure of her next step because of too much cerebration, I have made it my practice to let the facts find the theory.

David Levering Lewis

#2. But to "settle" the Eastern Question was beyond even Disraeli's power - beyond, it seems, any human power, for it still haunts the world today.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#3. There can be no economy where there is no efficiency.

Benjamin Disraeli

#4. The Italians say it is not necessary to be a stag; but we ought not to be a tortoise.

Benjamin Disraeli

#5. What we call public opinion is generally public sentiment.

Benjamin Disraeli

#6. A practical man is a man who practices the errors of his forefathers.

Benjamin Disraeli

#7. There is no index of character as sure as the voice.

Benjamin Disraeli

#8. No one for a moment can pretend that printing is so great a discovery as writing, or algebra as a language.

Benjamin Disraeli

#9. A realist is a man who insists on making the same mistakes his grandfather did.

Benjamin Disraeli

#10. It is much easier to be critical than to be correct.

Benjamin Disraeli

#11. When a man fell into his anecdotage it was a sign for him to retire from the world.

Benjamin Disraeli

#12. Silence often expresses 'more powerfully than speech the verdict and judgment of society.

Benjamin Disraeli

#13. With words we govern men.

Benjamin Disraeli

#14. What wonderful things are events! The least are of greater importance than the most sublime and comprehensive speculations.

Benjamin Disraeli

#15. I grew intoxicated with my own eloquence.

Benjamin Disraeli

#16. We are not creatures of circumstance; we are creators of circumstance.

Benjamin Disraeli

#17. In all church discussions we are apt to forget the second Testament is avowedly only a supplement. Jesus came to complete the law and the prophets. Christianity is completed Judaism, or it is nothing. Christianity is incomprehensible without Judaism, as Judaism is incomplete without Christianity.

Benjamin Disraeli

#18. The originality of a subject is in its treatment.

Benjamin Disraeli

#19. The gondola of London [a hansom].

Benjamin Disraeli

#20. If a man be gloomy let him keep to himself. No one has the right to go croaking about society, or what is worse, looking as if he stifled grief.

Benjamin Disraeli

#21. Terror has its inspiration, as well as competition.

Benjamin Disraeli

#22. No enemy is so terrible as a man of genius.

Benjamin Disraeli

#23. It has been my lot to have found myself in many distant lands. I have never been in one without finding a Scotchman, and I never found a Scotchman who was not head of the poll.

Benjamin Disraeli

#24. Little things affect little minds.

Benjamin Disraeli

#25. My idea of an acceptable person is someone that is ready to accept my ideas.

Benjamin Disraeli

#26. Knowledge must be gained by ourselves. Mankind may supply us with facts; but the results, even if they agree with previous ones, must be the work of our own minds.

Benjamin Disraeli

#27. The stage is a supplement to the pulpit, where virtue, according to Plato's sublime idea, moves our love and affection when made visible to the eye.

Benjamin Disraeli

#28. It destroys one's nerves to be amiable every day to the same human being.

Benjamin Disraeli

#29. Fame has eagle wings, and yet she mounts not so high as man's desires.

Benjamin Disraeli

#30. As a rule, man is a fool. When it's hot, he wants it cool; When its cool, he wants it hot. Always wanting, what is not.

Benjamin Disraeli

#31. That earliest shock in one's life which occurs to all of us; which first makes us think.

Benjamin Disraeli

#32. Here's to the man who rode the race, who took the time, who kept the time, and who did the trick.

Benjamin Disraeli

#33. To do nothing and get something, formed a boy's ideal of a manly career.

Benjamin Disraeli

#34. Benjamin Disraeli had anticipated Erewhon's fears in his novel Coningsby: "The mystery of mysteries," he wrote, "is to view machines making machines, a spectacle that fills the mind with curious and even awful speculation.

Ronald Wright

#35. Having the courage to live within one's means is respectability.

Benjamin Disraeli

#36. There's three kinds of lies in this world:
There's lies ...
There's damned lies ...
And there's statistics

Benjamin Disraeli

#37. A man's fate is his own temper; and according to that will be his opinion as to the particular manner in which the course of events is regulated. A consistent man believes in destiny, a capricious man in chance.

Benjamin Disraeli

#38. Generally speaking, among sensible persons, it would seem that a rich man deems that friend a sincere one who does not want to borrow his money; while, among the less favored with fortune's gifts, the sincere friend is generally esteemed to be the individual who is ready to lend it.

Benjamin Disraeli

#39. I think there is nothing more lovely than the love of two beautiful women who are not envious of each other's charms.

Benjamin Disraeli

#40. A man's fate is his own temper.

Benjamin Disraeli

#41. The feathered arrow of satire has oft been wet with the heart's blood of its victims.

Benjamin Disraeli

#42. You read what Disraeli had to say. I don't remember what he said. He said something. He's no longer with us.

Bob Dole

#43. Nature is stronger than education.

Benjamin Disraeli

#44. Henry Kissinger may have wished I had presented him as a combination of Charles DeGaulle and Disraeli, but I didn't ... out of respect for DeGaulle and Disraeli. I described him as a cowboy because that is how he describes himself. If I were a cowboy I would be offended.

Oriana Fallaci

#45. Action may not always bring happiness; but there is no happiness without action.

Benjamin Disraeli

#46. Circumstances are beyond human control, but our conduct is in our own power.

Benjamin Disraeli

#47. 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.

Benjamin Disraeli

#48. Through persistence numerous individuals win accomplishment out of what appeared bound to be sure disappointment.

Benjamin Disraeli

#49. An insular country, subject to fogs, and with a powerful middle class, requires grave statesmen.

Benjamin Disraeli

#50. Be thine own privy counsellor.

Benjamin Disraeli

#51. A very remarkable people the Zulus: they defeat our generals, they convert our bishops, they have settled the fate of a great European dynasty.

Benjamin Disraeli

#52. Departures should be sudden.

Benjamin Disraeli

#53. London is a modern Babylon.

Benjamin Disraeli

#54. Moderation has been called a virtue to limit the ambition of great men, and to console undistinguished people for their want of fortune and their lack of merit.

Benjamin Disraeli

#55. I was told that the privileged and the people formed two nations.

Benjamin Disraeli

#56. Free trade is not a principle, it is an expedient.

Benjamin Disraeli

#57. Coalitions though successful have always found this, that their triumph has been brief.

Benjamin Disraeli

#58. The enterprise of America precedes that of Europe, as the industry of England precedes that of the rest of Europe.

Benjamin Disraeli

#59. Patience is a necessary ingredient of genius.

Benjamin Disraeli

#60. Characters do not change. Opinions alter, but characters are only developed.

Benjamin Disraeli

#61. What we anticipate seldom occurs: but what we least expect generally happens.

Benjamin Disraeli

#62. Man is a being born to believe. And if no church comes forward with its title-deeds of truth to guide him, he will find altars and idols in his own heart and his own imagination.

Benjamin Disraeli

#63. 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.

Benjamin Disraeli

#64. A person's fate is their own temper.

Benjamin Disraeli

#65. How fair is a garden amid the toils and passions of existence.

Benjamin Disraeli

#66. Great services are not canceled by one act or by one single error.

Benjamin Disraeli

#67. Everyone likes flattery; and when you come to Royalty you should lay it on with a trowel.

Benjamin Disraeli

#68. I am myself a gentleman of the press, and have no other escutcheon.

Benjamin Disraeli

#69. Nationality is the miracle of political independence; race is the principle of physical analogy.

Benjamin Disraeli

#70. Man is not the creature of circumstances, circumstances are the creatures of men.

Benjamin Disraeli

#71. Why should one say that the machine does not live? It breathes, for its breath forms the atmosphere of some towns.

Benjamin Disraeli

#72. Change is as inexorable as time, yet nothing meets with more resistance.

Benjamin Disraeli

#73. Nine-tenths of all existing books are nonsense.

Benjamin Disraeli

#74. To achieve what you want, you have to be stronger than those around you

Benjamin Disraeli

#75. Every woman should marry ... and no man.

Benjamin Disraeli

#76. As men advance in life, all passions resolve themselves into money. Love, ambition, even poetry, end in this.

Benjamin Disraeli

#77. There is moderation even in excess.

Benjamin Disraeli

#78. 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.

Benjamin Disraeli

#79. To tax the community for the advantage of a class is not protection: it is plunder.

Benjamin Disraeli

#80. Grief is the agony of an instant: the indulgence of grief is the blunder of life.

Benjamin Disraeli

#81. If you don't believe in magic, then you can't believe in reality.

Benjamin Disraeli

#82. No affection and a great brain, these are the people to command the world.

Benjamin Disraeli

#83. A parsimony of words prodigal of sense.

Benjamin Disraeli

#84. The Egremonts had never said anything that was remembered, or done anything that could be recalled.

Benjamin Disraeli

#85. Party is organized opinion.

Benjamin Disraeli

#86. There is a thread in our thoughts as there is a pulse in our feelings; he who can hold the one knows how to think, and he who can move the other knows how to feel.

Benjamin Disraeli

#87. The more extensive a man's knowledge of what has been done, the greater will be his power of knowing what to do.

Benjamin Disraeli

#88. He who gains time gains everything.

Benjamin Disraeli

#89. All power is a trust, that we are accountable for its exercise.

Benjamin Disraeli

#90. The constitution of England is not a paper constitution. It is an aggregate of institutions, many of them founded merely upon prescription, some of them fortified by muniments, but all of them the fruit and experience of an ancient and illustrious people.

Benjamin Disraeli

#91. Cosmopolitan critics, men who are the friends of every country save their own.

Benjamin Disraeli

#92. London; a nation, not a city.

Benjamin Disraeli

#93. Nonsense, when earnest, is impressive, and sometimes takes you in. If you are in a hurry, you occasionally mistake it for sense.

Benjamin Disraeli

#94. It shows you exactly how a star is formed; nothing else can be so pretty! A cluster of vapor, the cream of the milky way, a sort of celestial cheese, churned into light.

Benjamin Disraeli