Walter Bagehot: “In this manner all the great movements of thought in ancient and modern times have been nearly connected in time with…”

Perhaps such powers as these are what a wise man would most seek to exercise and least fear to possess.

Nothing promotes intellect like intellectual discussion, and nothing promotes intellectual discussion so much as government by discussion.

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.

Savages waste away before modern civilisation; they seem to have held their ground before the ancient.