Coningsby

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Longmans, Green, 1881
 

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Page 330 - You go with your family, sir, like a gentleman; you are not to consider your opinions, like a philosopher or a political adventurer.' 'Yes, sir,' said Coningsby, with animation, 'but men going with their families like gentlemen, and losing sight of every principle on which the society of this country ought to be established produced the Reform Bill.
Page 41 - At school, friendship is a passion. It entrances the being; it tears the soul. All loves of after-life can never bring its rapture, or its wretchedness; no bliss so absorbing, no pangs of jealousy or despair so crushing and so keen! What tenderness and what devotion; what illimitable confidence; infinite revelations of inmost thoughts; what ecstatic present and romantic future; what bitter estrangements and what melting reconciliations; what scenes of wild recrimination, agitating explanations, passionate...
Page 95 - Conservatism discards Prescription, shrinks from Principle, disavows Progress ; having rejected all respect for Antiquity, it offers no redress for the Present, and makes no preparation for the Future.
Page 231 - It is a peculiar class, that ; 1,'200/. per annum, paid quarterly, is their idea of political science and human nature. To receive 1,200/. per annum is government ; to try to receive 1,200/. per annum is opposition ; to wish to receive 1,200/. per annum is ambition.
Page 12 - We live in an age of prudence. The leaders of the people, now, generally follow. The truth is, the peers were in a fright. 'Twas a pity ; there is scarcely a less dignified entity than a patrician in a panic.
Page 220 - You never observe a great intellectual movement in Europe in which the Jews do not greatly participate. The first Jesuits were Jews; that mysterious Russian diplomacy which so alarms Western Europe, is organized and principally carried on by Jews; that mighty revolution which is at this moment preparing in Germany, and which will be, in fact, a second and greater Reformation, and of which so little is as yet known in England, is entirely developing under the auspices of Jews...
Page 165 - ... for they had been attainted. Of those twenty-nine not five remain, and they, as the Howards for instance, are not Norman nobility. We owe the English peerage to three sources: the spoliation of the Church; the open and flagrant sale of its honours by the elder Stuarts; and the boroughmongering of our own times. Those are the three main sources of the existing peerage of England, and in my opinion disgraceful ones. But I must apologise for my frankness in thus speaking to an aristocrat.
Page 210 - We are not indebted to the Reason of man for any of the great achievements which are the landmarks of human action and human progress. 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 truly great when he acts from the passions ; never irresistible...
Page 112 - On all subjects his mind seemed to be instructed, and his opinions formed. He flung out a result in a few words ; he solved with a phrase some deep problem that men muse over for years.

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