No great work has ever been produced except after a long interval of still and musing meditation.
Walter BagehotThe mystic reverence, the religious allegiance, which are essential to a true monarchy, are imaginative sentiments that no legislature can manufacture in any people.
Walter BagehotYou may talk of the tyranny of Nero and Tiberius; but the real tyranny is the tyranny of your next-door neighbor.
Walter BagehotBut of all nations in the world the English are perhaps the least a nation of pure philosophers.
Walter BagehotWar 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.
Walter Bagehot