Few persons are prevented from thinking themselves right by the reflection that, if they be right, the rest of the world is wrong. - Arthur Balfour

Our enemies, who, I may parenthetically remark, are attempting to change their constitution, appear to have no notion that what we want is not so much a change of the form of the apparatus of government as a change in the hearts by which that government is to be directed and animated, and if we are to judge, and surely we may judge without unfairness, of a man's heart by what he does, I would ask you whether those who have made mankind pale with horror over their early barbarities and brutal excesses in Belgium show the least sign that four years of war has in any material respect improved their disposition. Brutes they were when they begun the war, and, as far as we can judge, brutes they remain at the present moment.

[I]t is Authority rather than Reason to which, in the main, we owe, not religion only, but ethics and politics; that it is Authority which supplies us with essential elements in the premises of science; that it is Authority rather than Reason which lays deep the foundations of social life; that it is Authority rather than Reason which cements its superstructure. And though it may seem to savour of paradox, it is yet no exaggeration to say, that if we would find the quality in which we most notably excel the brute creation, we should look for it, not so much in our faculty of convincing and being convinced by the exercise of reasoning, as in our capacity for influencing and being influenced through the action of Authority.

Those who look forward to a period of continuous and, so to speak, inevitable progress, are bound to assign some more solid reason for their convictions than a merely empirical survey of the surface lessons of history. ...Humanity, civilisation, progress itself, must have a tendency to mitigate the harsh methods by which Nature has wrought out the variety and the perfection of organic life.