The being without an opinion is so painful to human nature that most people will leap to a hasty opinion rather than undergo it.
Walter BagehotLife is a compromise of what your ego wants to do, what experience tells you to do, and what your nerves let you do.
Walter BagehotI'm not the kind of writer who's able to block out the world around me. I'm mindful of our own haves and have-nots, how our culture often blames and punishes the have-nots. I worry about our precarious economic and political climate.
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