There can indeed be little doubt that for nearly two hundred years after its establishment in Europe, the Christian community exhibited a moral purit… - William Edward Hartpole Lecky

Ambition is the luxury of the happy. It is sometimes, but more rarely, the consolation and distraction of the wretched...

Among the intellectual phenomena of the present day, one of the most remarkable is certainly the presence among us of a small but able body of literary men, whose repugnance to modern liberal tendencies has led them to opinions on secular policy more fitted for the latitude of Russia than of England, and on religious policy more fitted for the Middle Ages than for the nineteenth century. The two things they hate the most are civil and religious liberty. Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, representative government, the rights of nations to determine the form of government under which they will live, the rights of weak minorities to protection, as long as they do not injure their neighbours, the right of every man to profess the religious belief and adopt the religious worship which he considers the best, are in their phraseology mere cant or shams. The two fundamental principles of all constitutional government—that the will of the majority should rule, and that the scruples of the minority should be respected—are equally antipathetic to them. The whole tendency of modern policy in their eyes is a mistake, and history has to them a certain melancholy charm as a record of religious and political despotisms which have been weakly banished from the world.

It is abundantly evident, both from history and from present experience, that the instinctive shock, or natural feeling of disgust, caused by the sight of the sufferings of men is not generically different from that which is caused by the sight of the sufferings of animals.