Walter Bagehot: “They were not influenced by ideas, but by facts; not by things impalpable, but by things palpable.”

All savage religions are full of superstitions founded on luck.

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.

The progress of the military art is the most conspicuous, I was about to say the most SHOWY, fact in human history.

I do not think I put this too high when I say that a most important if not the most important object of early legislation was the enforcement of LUCKY rites.