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Benjamin Disraeli Quotes (1804-1881)
Politician, King, Novelist
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About Benjamin Disraeli
Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield (21 December 1804 – 19 April 1881) was a British politician, novelist, and essayist, serving twice as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. The anniversary of his death on 19 April is known as Primrose Day.
Best Benjamin Disraeli Quotes
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Explore our curated collection of the most famous and impactful Benjamin Disraeli quotes.
“I hate definitions.”
“His Christianity was muscular.”
“There is moderation even in excess.”
“Despair is the conclusion of fools.”
“A series of congratulatory regrets.”
“In politics nothing is contemptible.”
Benjamin Disraeli Quotes by Topic
Find exactly what you are looking for by browsing this categorized list of Benjamin Disraeli quotes by topic.
Benjamin Disraeli on Government 6 quotes
“A Conservative Government is an organized hypocrisy.”
Benjamin Disraeli on Speech 4 quotes
“A series of congratulatory regrets.”
Benjamin Disraeli on Ignorance 3 quotes
View all 3 quotes on Ignorance →Benjamin Disraeli on Marriage 3 quotes
View all 3 quotes on Marriage →Benjamin Disraeli on Expectations 3 quotes
“Everything comes if a man will only wait.”
Benjamin Disraeli on Conservative Party (UK) 3 quotes
“Gentlemen, the Tory party, unless it is a national party, is nothing.”
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Benjamin Disraeli on Justice 2 quotes
View all 2 quotes on Justice →Benjamin Disraeli on London 2 quotes
View all 2 quotes on London →Benjamin Disraeli on Political parties 2 quotes
View all 2 quotes on Political parties →Benjamin Disraeli on England 2 quotes
“We are indeed a nation of shopkeepers.”
Benjamin Disraeli on Politics 2 quotes
View all 2 quotes on Politics →Benjamin Disraeli on Principles 2 quotes
“Principle is ever my motto, no expediency.”
What Benjamin Disraeli Said About Others
Discover personal opinions Benjamin Disraeli shared regarding contemporaries.
Benjamin Disraeli on William Ewart Gladstone 4 quotes
“Lord Palmerston's "dangerous man" has at length verified that statesman's prophecy of his ultimate insanity.”
Benjamin Disraeli on John Russell, 1st Earl Russell 4 quotes
“But, my Lord, how thunderstruck must be our visitor when he is told to recognise a Secretary of State in an infinitely small scarabæus;—yes, my Lord, when he learns, that you are the leader of the English House of Commons, our traveller may begin to comprehend how the Egyptians worshipped—AN INSECT.”
Benjamin Disraeli on Edward Smith-Stanley, 14th Earl of Derby 3 quotes
“He astonishes me – his mind always clear – his patience extraordinary – he rises in difficulty, and his resources never fail.”
Benjamin Disraeli on Richard Cobden 2 quotes
“The verdict of posterity will be... that he [Cobden] was the greatest political character that the pure middle class of this country has yet produced.”
Benjamin Disraeli on Irish people 2 quotes
“Thus 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.”
Benjamin Disraeli on William Pitt the Younger 2 quotes
“He created a plebeian aristocracy and blended it with the patrician oligarchy. He made peers of second-rate squires and fat graziers. He caught them in the alleys of Lombard Street, and clutched them from the counting-houses of Cornhill.”
Benjamin Disraeli on Daniel O'Connell 2 quotes
“This man, O'Connell, is the hired instrument of the Papacy; as such, his mission is to destroy your Protestant Society, and, as such, he is a more terrible enemy to England than Napoleon, with all his inspiration. Your empire and your liberties are in more danger at this moment than when the army of invasion was encamped at Boulogne.”
Benjamin Disraeli on Otto von Bismarck 2 quotes
“Bismarck soars above all: he is six foot four I shd. think, proportionately stout; with a sweet and gentle voice, and with a peculiarly refined enunciation, wh. singularly and strangely contrasts with the awful things he says: appalling from their frankness and their audacity. He is a complete despot here, and from the highest to the lowest of the Prussians, and all the permanent foreign diplomacy, tremble at his frown and court most sedulously his smile. He loads me with kindnesses, and, tho' often preoccupied, with an immediate dissolution of Parliament on his hands, an internecine war with the Socialists, 100's of whom he puts daily into prison in defiance of all law, he yesterday exacted from me a promise that, before I depart, I will once more dine with him quite alone. His palace has large and beautiful gardens. He has never been out since I came here, except the memorable day when he called on me to ascertain whe[the]r my policy was an ultimatum. I convinced him it was, and the Russians surrendered a few hours afterwards.”
Benjamin Disraeli on John Stuart Mill
Benjamin Disraeli on Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston
Benjamin Disraeli on Robert Peel
“The Right Honourable gentleman caught the Whigs bathing and walked away with their clothes.”
Quotes About Benjamin Disraeli
Gain deeper perspective through quotes about Benjamin Disraeli from others.
Lord Acton on Benjamin Disraeli
“He was quite remarkable enough to fill a volume of Éloge. 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.”
Stanley Baldwin on Benjamin Disraeli
“Toryism, as we know it, was illuminated, expounded, and made a gospel for a large portion of this country by the genius of Benjamin Disraeli. Most of us who have worked for our great party have founded our beliefs on, and derived our inspiration from that statesman.”
Robert Blake on Benjamin Disraeli 4 quotes
“Time and time again the stories we read about Disraeli's demeanour, dress and conversation remind us not so much of the grave sedate bourgeois England that he was destined to govern as of the England which flourished ten years after his death – the England of the Yellow Book and Oscar Wilde. Wilde acknowledged his debt. It was no accident that he chose the title of Dorian Gray for one of his most extravagant books, and his own famous epigrams might well, without incongruity, have appeared in the pages of a Disraeli novel.”
John Bright on Benjamin Disraeli 2 quotes
“Now, Mr. Disraeli is a man who does what may be called the conjuring for his party. He is what, amongst a tribe of Red Indians, would be called "the mystery man." He invents phrases for them... Mr. Disraeli is a man of brains, of genius, of great capacity for action, of a wonderful tenacity of purpose, and of a rare courage. He would have been a statesman if his powers had been directed by any noble principle or idea.”
Arthur Bryant on Benjamin Disraeli 3 quotes
“Benjamin Disraeli was a great man. Alone among statesmen of his generation he perceived the fallacy of the Manchester School and of the departure in national policy which it had initiated. The immediate interests of the factory owner, the worker and the investor might be served by a free trade policy. But in the long run he knew that the policy must leave the nation at the mercy of world-wide forces beyond its control.”
Edward Bulwer-Lytton on Benjamin Disraeli
Lord Carnarvon on Benjamin Disraeli
“[T]his was the anniversary of the death of one of the most remarkable of English statesmen, who passed away amid the genuine sorrow of untold thousands. It had been his duty and his privilege to act with Lord Beaconsfield ... and he wished Lord Beaconsfield could be recalled from his grave now to lend his counsel and the experience of his long life to a country harassed and vexed and storm-tossed as ours was now. Lord Beaconsfield's great quality was a genuine and ardent love of his country, love of its greatness, and jealously for its ancient honour. In him there was no preference for foreign practices and cosmopolitan ideas.”
E. H. Carr on Benjamin Disraeli
“The great European figures of the later nineteenth century were Disraeli and Bismarck, who strove to weld together the "two nations" into one through the agencies of the social service state, popular education and imperialism, refuted the taunt that "the worker has no country", and paved the way for "national labour", "national socialism" and even "national communism".”
Joseph Chamberlain on Benjamin Disraeli
“I think I could not offer a greater offence to my Conservative friends here or anywhere than to tell them that they are not a progressive party. They may not have agreed to the demand for revolutionary changes in the past, but they have been in a special sense—and it cannot be denied by any fair critic—the great apostles of social reform. And who was their teacher? Who was their leader? It was Mr. Disraeli, who laid the seeds of his doctrine in his great novel Sybil. Though he found his party slow to educate, they made such progress under his guidance, and under the subsequent guidance of Lord Randolph Churchill and others, that they have now arrived at a position in which they may fairly claim that it is to their efforts and to their legislation that the great social reforms now impressed upon the Statute-book of this country are due.”
Winston Churchill on Benjamin Disraeli
“Lord Beaconsfield was the great enemy of Mr. Gladstone, and everybody called him 'Dizzy.' However, this time [1880] 'Dizzy' had been thoroughly beaten by Mr. Gladstone, so we were all flung out into Opposition and the country began to be ruined very rapidly. Everyone said it was 'going to the dogs.' And then on top of all this Lord Beaconsfield got very ill. He had a long illness; and as he was also very old, it killed him. I followed his illness from day to day with great anxiety, because everyone said what a loss he would be to his country and how no one else could stop Mr. Gladstone from working his wicked will upon us all. I was always sure Lord Beaconsfield was going to die, and at last the day came when all the people I saw went about with very sad faces because, as they said, a great and splendid Statesman, who loved our country and defied the Russians, had died of a broken heart because of the ingratitude with which he had been treated by the Radicals.”
Earl of Clarendon on Benjamin Disraeli
“Lady Augusta Stanley, who is an authority on Court matters, told me that Dizzy writes daily letters to the Queen in his best novel style, telling her every scrap of political news dressed up to serve his own purpose, and every scrap of social gossip cooked to amuse her. She declares that she has never had such letters in her life, which is probably true, and that she never before knew everything!”
Misattributed Quotes
Quotes mistakenly credited to Benjamin Disraeli
“There are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics.”
“Moderation has been called a virtue to limit the ambition of great men, and to console undistinguished people for their want of fortune and their lack of merit.”
“The choicest pleasures of life lie within the ring of moderation.”
“John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich: "Foote, I have often wondered what catastrophe would bring you to your end; but I think, that you must either die of the pox, or the halter."
Samuel Foote: "My lord, that will depend upon one of two contingencies; -- whether I embrace your lordship's mistress, or your lordship's principles."”
Samuel Foote: "My lord, that will depend upon one of two contingencies; -- whether I embrace your lordship's mistress, or your lordship's principles."”
“Under this roof are the heads of the family of Rothschild a name famous in every capital of Europe and every division of the globe. If you like, we shall divide the United States into two parts, one for you, James, and one for you, Lionel. Napoleon will do exactly and all that I shall advise him to do; and to Bismark will be suggested such an intoxicating programme as to make him our abject slave.”
“Every production of genius must be the production of enthusiasm.”
“Mediocrity can talk; but it is for genius to observe.”
“Plagiarists, at least, have the merit of preservation.”
“The wisdom of the wise, and the experience of ages, may be preserved by quotation.
• Variant: The wisdom of the wise and the experience of the ages are perpetuated by quotations.”
• Variant: The wisdom of the wise and the experience of the ages are perpetuated by quotations.”
About Benjamin Disraeli
Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield (21 December 1804 – 19 April 1881) was a British politician, novelist, and essayist, serving twice as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. The anniversary of his death on 19 April is known as Primrose Day.