t noble that he is more capable of leading the
country than most men composing it would be.

Democracy, after having made everything supremely hideous and
uncomfortable for everybody, always ends by clinging to the coat tails
of some successful general.

The prosperous politician may be honest, but his honesty is at best a
questionable quality. The moment that a thing is a metier, it is
wholly absurd to talk about any disinterestedness in the pursuit of
it. To the professional politician national affairs are a manufacture
into which he puts his audacity and his time, and out of which he
expects to make so much percentage for his lifetime.

There is too great a tendency to govern the world by noise.

Ouida's aphorisms on women, love, and modern society are somewhat more
characteristic:

Women speak as though the heart were to be treated at will like a
stone, or a bath.
Half the passions of men die early, because they are expected to be
eternal.
It is the folly of life that lends charm to it.
What is the cause of half the misery of women? That their love is so
much more tenacious than the man's: it grows stronger as his grows
weaker.
To endure the country in England for long, one must have the rusticity
of Wordsworth's mind, and boots and stockings as homely.
It is because men feel the necessity to explain that they drop into
the habit of saying what is not true. Wise is the woman who never
insists on an explanation.
Love can make its own world in a solitude a deux, but marriage cannot.
Nominally monogamous, all cultured society is polygamous; often even
polyandrous.
Moralists say that a soul should resist passion. They might as well
say that a house should resist an earthquake.
The whole world is just now on its knees before the poorer classes:
all the cardinal virtues are taken for granted in them, and it is only
property of any kind which is the sinner.
Men are not merciful to women's tears as a rule; and when it is a
woman belonging to them who weeps, they only go out, and slam the door
behind them.
Men always consider women unjust to them, when they fail to deify
their weaknesses.
No passion, once broken, will ever bear renewal.
Feeling loses its force and its delicacy if we put it under the
microscope too often.
Anything which is not flattery seems injustice to a woman.
When