William Ewart Gladstone

If you weren’t such a great man, you’d be a terrible bore.

Failure is success if we learn from it.

No man ever became great or good except through many and great mistakes.

If you are cold, tea will warm you; if you are too heated, it will cool you; If you are depressed, it will cheer you; If you are excited, it will calm you.

Justice delayed is justice denied.

Good laws make it easier to do right and harder to do wrong.

In order to fully realize how bad a popular play can be, it is necessary to see it twice.

My liver swells with bile difficult to repress.

There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.

I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.

Were it not for imagination a man would be as happy in arms of a chambermaid as of a duchess.

A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.

Let your character be kept up the very end, just as it began, and so be consistent.

Love truth, but pardon error.

The great advantages of simulation and dissimulation are three. First to lay asleep opposition and to surprise. For where a man’s intentions are published, it is an alarum to call up all that are against them. The second is to reserve a man’s self a fair retreat: for if a man engage himself, by a manifest declaration, he must go through, or take a fall. The third is, the better to discover the mind of another. For to him that opens himself, men will hardly show themselves adverse; but will fair let him go on, and turn their freedom of speech to freedom of thought.

It’s so hard to know what to do when one wishes earnestly to do right.

Nobody can bring you peace but yourself.

Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.

Revenge is the act of passion, vengeance is an act of justice.

It is by the goodness of God that we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.

One way of getting an idea of our fellow-countrymen’s miseries is to go and look at their pleasures.