E. F. L. Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax Quotations

True merit, like a river, the deeper it is, the less noise it makes.

Ignorance makes most men go into a political party, and shame keeps them from getting out of it.

Those who are of the opinion that money will do everything may reasonably be expected to do everything for money.

The best party is but a kind of conspiracy against the rest of the nation.

Hope is generally a wrong guide, though it is very good company by the way.

Men who borrow their opinions can never repay their debts.

The plainer the dress, the greater luster does beauty appear.

A person may dwell so long upon a thought that it may take him a prisoner.

Gratitude is one of those things that cannot be bought. It must be born with men, or else all the obligations in the world will not create it.

He who leaves nothing to chance will do few things poorly, but he will do few things.

Most men's anger about religion is as if two men should quarrel for a lady they neither of them care for.

The invisible thing called a Good Name is made up of the breath of numbers that speak well of you.

When people contend for their liberty they seldom get anything for their victory, but new masters.

If the laws could speak for themselves, they would complain of the lawyers.

Nothing would more contribute to make a man wise than to have always an enemy in his view.

If none were to have Liberty but those who understand what it is, there would not be many freed Men in the world.

A fool hath no dialogue within himself, the first thought carrieth him without the reply of a second.

The several sorts of religion in the world are little more than so many spiritual monopolies.

A man that steps aside from the world and has leisure to observe it without interest and design, thinks all mankind as mad as they think him.

Friendship cannot live with ceremony, nor without civility.

The past is the best way to suppose what may come.

Power is so apt to be insolent and Liberty to be saucy, that they are seldom upon good Terms.

Business is so much lower a thing than learning that a man used to the last cannot easily bring his stomach down to the first.

Gratitude is one of those things that cannot be bought.

The more arguments you win, the less friends you will have

A man that should call everything by its right name would hardly pass the streets without being knocked down as a common enemy.

There is an accumulative cruelty in a number of men, though none in particular are ill natured.

In our corrupted state, common weaknesses and defects contribute more towards the reconciling us to one another than all the precepts of the philosophers and divines.

I often think how much easier the world would have been to manage if Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini had been at Oxford.

Formality is sufficiently revenged upon the world for being so unreasonably laughed at; it is destroyed, it is true, but it hath the spiteful satisfaction of seeing everything destroyed with it.