Walter Bagehot: “So far from being capable of a continuous and concerted co-operation they were all the while trying to thwart one…”

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.

I cannot, therefore, join in the full cry against anomalies; in my judgment it may quickly overrun the scent, and so miss what we should be glad to find.

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

I own that I do not entirely sympathise with the horror of these anomalies which haunts some of our best critics.