The House of Lords wants nothing of the nation, and therefore it is the only candid and disinterested guardian of the people’s needs and resources.  It has never withstood the real desire of the country:  it has only stood between the country and its impetuous and evanescent follies.

A democracy cannot understand honour; how should it?  The Caucus is chiefly made up of men who sand their sugar, put alum in their bread, forge bayonets and girders which bend like willow-wands, send bad calico to India, and insure vessels at Lloyd’s which they know will go to the bottom before they have been ten days at sea.

Lord Salisbury has often been accused of arrogance; people have never seen that what they mistook for arrogance was the natural, candid consciousness of a great noble that he is more capable of leading the country than most men composing it would be.

   Democracy, after having made everything supremely hideous and
   uncomfortable for everybody, always ends by clinging to the coat tails
   of some successful general.

The prosperous politician may be honest, but his honesty is at best a questionable quality.  The moment that a thing is a metier, it is wholly absurd to talk about any disinterestedness in the pursuit of it.  To the professional politician national affairs are a manufacture into which he puts his audacity and his time, and out of which he expects to make so much percentage for his lifetime.

   There is too great a tendency to govern the world by noise.

Ouida’s aphorisms on women, love, and modern society are somewhat more characteristic: 

Women speak as though the heart were to be treated at will like a stone, or a bath.  Half the passions of men die early, because they are expected to be eternal.  It is the folly of life that lends charm to it.  What is the cause of half the misery of women?  That their love is so much more tenacious than the man’s:  it grows stronger as his grows weaker.  To endure the country in England for long, one must have the rusticity of Wordsworth’s mind, and boots and stockings as homely.  It is because men feel the necessity to explain that they drop into the habit of saying what is not true.  Wise is the woman who never insists on an explanation.  Love can make its own world in a solitude a deux, but marriage cannot.  Nominally monogamous, all cultured society is polygamous; often even polyandrous.  Moralists say that a soul should resist passion.  They might as well say that a house should resist an earthquake.  The whole world is just now on its knees before the poorer classes:  all the cardinal virtues are taken for granted in them, and it is only property of any kind which is the sinner.  Men are not merciful to women’s tears as a rule; and when it is a woman belonging to them who weeps, they only go out, and slam the door behind them.  Men always consider women