Oratory is, after all, the prose literature of the savage. - George Saintsbury

When people cannot write good literature it is perhaps natural that they should lay down rules how good literature should be written.

We shall not busy ourselves with what men ought to have admired, what they ought to have written, what they ought to have thought, but with what they did think, write, admire.

I wish that I could save myself constant repetition by printing across the dog's-ear place of these pages the warning, "Never judge a critic by your agreement with his likes and dislikes.”