It is not so in the world of action, where the conditions are directly reversed; where the one player contends against many players, seen and unseen; where each move is met by some counter-move; where the finest touches are often unnoted of men or rudely blotted out by a mysterious hand stretched forth from the darkness.
"I wish I could be as sure of anything," said Melbourne, "as Tom Macaulay is of everything." Melbourne was a man of affairs, Macaulay a man of books; and so throughout the story the men of action have been fatalists, from Caesar to Napoleon and Bismarck, nothing certain except the invisible player behind the screen.
Of all human contrivances the most imperfect is government.

In spite of the essays of Bentham and Mill the science of government has yet to be discovered.

The ideal statesman can only exist in the ideal state, which has never existed.
The politician, like the poor, we have always with us.

As long as men delegate to other men the function of acting for them, of thinking for them, we shall continue to have him.
He is a variable quantity.

In the crowded centers his distinguishing marks are short hair and cunning; upon the frontier, sentiment and the six-shooter! In New York he becomes a boss; in Kentucky and Texas, a fighter and an orator.