Walter Bagehot: “It is in vain to pile detail on detail when the objection is one of first principle.”

That a House of Commons may work well it must perform, as we saw, five functions well: it must elect a Ministry well, legislate well, teach the nation well, express the nation's will well, bring matters to the nation's attention well.

If those persons be people of different temperaments, different ideas, and different educations, you have an almost infallible security that nothing, or almost nothing, will be done with excessive rapidity.

He gave an excellent moral example to his contemporaries, but he is an instance of those whose good dies with them, while their evil lives after them.

But the Jewish advantage never did so; beginning in religion, contrary to a thousand analogies, it remained religious.