How is it, I wonder, that all religious officials, from God the Father to the parish beadle, should be so arbitrary and exacting. - Samuel Butler

We are so far identical with our ancestors and our contemporaries that it is very rarely we can see anything that they do not see. It is not unjust that the sins of the fathers should be visited upon the children, for the children committed the sins when in the persons of their fathers.

Intellectual over-indulgence is the most gratuitous and disgraceful form which excess can take, nor is there any the consequences of which are more disastrous.

Silence is not always tact and it is tact that is golden, not silence.