Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography. - Evelyn Waugh

They are a very decent, generous lot of people out here and they don't expect you to listen. Always remember that, dear boy. It's the secret of social ease in this country. They talk entirely for their own pleasure. Nothing they say is designed to be heard.

William Wilberforce was inflated by the true nineteenth-century arrogance of thinking that a little local uplift could reverse the development of centuries. Slave raiding has from remotest times been the hobby of the warrior tribes of Africa: slave ownership has been one of the postulates of every civilization. British wealth and British sentiment were strong enough to upset a system which, like any other, had abuses but also many redeeming virtues, but British intelligence was not up to anticipating the problem it created.

There is nothing to be gained by multiplying social distinctions indefinitely.