Walter Bagehot

Progress would not have been the rarity it is if the early food had not been the late poison.

It is good to be without vices, but it is not good to be without temptations.

War both needs and generates certain virtues; not the highest, but what may be called the preliminary virtues, as valor, veracity, the spirit of obedience, the habit of discipline. Any of these, and of others like them, when possessed by a nation, and no matter how generated, will give them a military advantage, and make them more likely to stay in the race of nations.

Efficiency in an assembly requires a solid mass of steady votes; and these are collected by a deferential attachment to particular men, or by a belief in the principles that those men represent, and they are maintained by fear of those men - by the fear that if you vote against them, you may soon yourself have no vote at all.

Life is a compromise of what your ego wants to do, what experience tells you to do, and what your nerves let you do.

The most melancholy of human reflections, perhaps, is that, on the whole, it is a question whether the benevolence of mankind does most good or harm.

Every banker knows that if he has to prove that he is worthy of credit, however good may be his arguments, in fact his credit is gone: but what we have requires no proof.

The being without an opinion is so painful to human nature that most people will leap to a hasty opinion rather than undergo it.

So long as war is the main business of nations, temporary despotism - despotism during the campaign - is indispensable.

One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.

The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.

The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards

So long as there are earnest believers in the world, they will always wish to punish opinions, even if their judgment tells them it is unwise and their conscience that it is wrong.