Walter Bagehot: “A public department is very apt to be dead to what is wanting for a great occasion till the occasion is past.”

The lessons are good where its primitive assumptions hold, but may be false where those assumptions fail.

These anomalies, in a hundred instances, mark the old boundaries of a constitutional struggle.

At last it strikes you that they grew up, house by house, on the devious tracks of the old green lanes; and if you follow on to the existing fields, you may often find the change half complete.

It is natural that those who by special and admirable culture have come to look at all things upon the artistic side, should start back from these queer peculiarities.