The sycophant - who in the pay of the English oligarchy played the romantic laudator temporis acti against the French Revolution just as, in the pay of the North American colonies at the beginning of the American troubles, he had played the liberal against the English oligarchy - was an out-and-out vulgar bourgeois.

It has always been with me, a test of the sense and candour of any one belonging to the opposite party, whether he allowed Burke to be a great man.

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

Society can overlook murder, adultery or swindling - it never forgives the preaching of a new gospel.

Of all wild beasts preserve me from a tyrant; and of all tame, a flatterer.

Whenever he met a great man he grovelled before him, and my-lorded him as only a free-born Briton can do.

My so-called foreign friends do neither me nor the situation nor themselves any good when they try to bring me into opposition to the allegedly impossible Nati…