I don't myself believe in artful diplomacy; I have no gift for it.

Is it natural effervescence, or is it deadly fermentation?

I think any man who lays down a firm proposition that all is well, or any man who says that all is ill--either of those two men is probably wrong.

No: not at all; because there is so much, I will not say of random variety, but there is so much independent use of mind upon the facts that we have to deal with, that I listen with endless edification and instruction.

I am trying to feel my way through the most difficult problem, the most difficult situation that a responsible Government can have to face.

But as I read it, as I listen to serious Indian experts with large experience, it all sounds estrangement and alienation even though it be no worse than superficial.

They hope to attract that good will which must, after all, be the real foundation of our prosperity and strength in India.

We do not know how to leave India, and therefore let us see if we know how to govern it.

Do not weary or fret or nag him with your superior wisdom.

If I were going to remain Indian Secretary for some time to come, my every effort would be devoted to an abatement of that enormous amount of writing.

An Indian gentleman has been placed on the Council of the Viceroy--not an everyday transaction.

Fitness is henceforth to be the criterion of eligibility.

Inspire him with the desire of pleasing; he will soon know more of the art than all the masters could teach him.

All alike concerned themselves with its truth or falsehood, with what they counted to be its abstract fitness or unfitness.

We ought to be able to separate in thought the question of the grounds and evidence for a given dogma being true, from the distinct and purely historic question of the social and intellectual conditions which made men accept it for true.

If the idea was the direct gift of heaven, the policy was due to the sagacity and mother-wit of the great ecclesiastical statesmen.

Turgot was one of the men to whom good government is a religion.

But Turgot was one of those severe and scrupulous souls, to whom a wicked promise does not cease to be degrading by becoming hypocritical.

It would be a happy day for the Peace Society that should give the colonies a veto on imperial war.

Could ministers justify abandonment, without far stronger evidence than they then possessed that they could not govern the Transvaal peaceably?

This was a complete falsification of a whole set of our national promises.

The general situation in Egypt had latterly become one in which everything was governed by sheer military violence.

But the Poet Laureate has written his own song on the hearts of his countrymen that can never die.

I would use my best endeavours to make these States independent in matters of administration.