Walter Bagehot: “Metaphors from law and metaphors from war make most of our current moral phrases, and a nice examination would easily…”

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

Our law very often reminds one of those outskirts of cities where you cannot for a long time tell how the streets come to wind about in so capricious and serpent-like a manner.

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

The casual line was traced according to the strength of deceased combatants; succeeding generations fought elsewhere; and the hesitating line of a half-drawn battle was left to stand for a perpetual limit.