Walter Bagehot: “Nobody will understand Parliament government who fancies it an easy thing, a natural thing, a thing not needing…”

If the above reasoning be sound, compulsory constituencies are necessary, voluntary constituencies destructive; the optional transferability of votes is not a salutary aid, but a ruinous innovation.

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.

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.