24 Benjamin Disraeli Quotes on History

Benjamin Disraeli quotes on history

3. Yes, I am a Jew, and when the ancestors of the right honorable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon.

6. Consider Ireland. You have a starving population, an absentee aristocracy, and an alien Church, and in addition the weakest executive in the world. That is the Irish Question.

15. A precedent embalms a principle.

20. The legacy of heroes - the memory of a great name and the inheritance of a great example.

26. Posterity is a most limited assembly. Those gentlemen who reach posterity are not much more numerous than the planets.

28. Colonies do not cease to be colonies because they are independent.

33. Assassination has never changed the history of the world.

34. In the character of the victim [Lincoln], and even in the accessories of his last moments, there is something so homely and innocent that it takes the question, as it were, out of all the pomp of history and the ceremonial of diplomacy-it touches the heart of nations and appeals to the domestic sentiment of mankind.

47. You behold a range of exhausted volcanoes. Not a flame flickers on a single pallid crest.

50. The most distinguishing feature, or, at least, one of the most distinguishing features, of the great change effected in 1832 was that those who effected it at once abolished all the franchises as ancient as those of the Baronage of England; and, while they abolished them, they offered and proposed no substitute. The discontent upon the subject of representation which afterwards more or less pervaded our society dates from that period, and that discontent, all will admit, has ceased. It was terminated by the Act of Parliamentary Reform of 1867-8. That act was founded on a confidence that the great body of the people of this country were 'Conservative'. I use the word in its purest and loftiest sense. I mean that the people of England, and especially the working classes of England, are proud of belonging to a great country, and wish to maintain its greatness-that they are proud of belonging to an Imperial country, and are resolved to maintain, if they can, the empire of England-that they believe, on the whole, that the greatness and the empire of England are to be attributed to the ancient institutions of this country...There are people who may be, or who at least affect to be, working men, and who, no doubt, have a certain influence with a certain portion of the metropolitan working class, who talk Jacobinism...I say with confidence that the great body of the working class of England utterly repudiate such sentiments. They have no sympathy with them. They are English to the core. They repudiate cosmopolitan principles. They adhere to national principles. They are for maintaining the greatness of the kingdom and the empire, and they are proud of being subjects of our Sovereign and members of such an Empire. Well, then, as regards the political institutions of this country, the maintenance of which is one of the chief tenets of the Tory party, so far as I can read public opinion, the feeling of the nation is in accordance with the Tory party.

102. The age of chivalry is past. Bores have succeeded to dragons.

     Attribution disputed; shown as originally published.

106. Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.

123. 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.

125. It was not reason that besieged Troy; it was not reason that sent forth the Saracen from the desert to conquer the world; that inspired the crusades; that instituted the monastic orders; it was not reason that produced the Jesuits; above all, it was not reason that created the French Revolution. Man is only great when he acts from the passions; never irresistible but when he appeals to the imagination.

134. The Duke of Wellington brought to the post of first minister immortal fame; a quality of success which would almost seem to include all others.

154. The view of Jerusalem is the history of the world; it is more, it is the history of earth and of heaven.

158. We moralise among ruins.

159. London is a modern Babylon.

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

191. Charles Greville was the most conceited person with whom I have ever been brought in contact, though I have read Cicero and known Bulwer-Lytton.

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

256. The wisdom of the wise, and the experience of ages, may be preserved by quotation.

     Attribution disputed; shown as originally published.

260. He was quite remarkable enough to fill a volume of Eloge. Someone wrote to me yesterday that no Jew for 1800 years has played so great a part in the world. That would be no Jew since St. Paul; and it is very startling.

264. The downfall of Beaconfieldism is like the vanishing of some vast magnificent castle in an Italian romance.