Quotes & Sayings About Peculiarities

There are two distinctive peculiarities by reference to which we characterize the soul (1) local movement and (2) thinking, discriminating, and perceiving. Thinking both speculative and practical is regarded as akin to a form of perceiving; for in the one as well as the other the soul discriminates and is cognizant of something which is. — Aristotle.

Modus Operandi, or method of operation, is really a term that refers to the habits, techniques and peculiarities of behavior of a criminal. All criminals have a modus operandi, — Mauro V. Corvasce

Every one has his peculiarities and cannot get rid of them; and yet many a one is destroyed by his peculiarities, and those too of the most innocent kind. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

There are several peculiarities that I share with children which, like having no front teeth, are perhaps more acceptable in the very young, but which, for better or worse, seem to be a part of my makeup. — Zilpha Keatley Snyder

I think everybody has experiences from time to time they can't explain. They are peculiarities. Usually we just dismiss them because they are uncomfortable to think about. — Stephen King

...his condition in Roanoke is a strong testament that lassitude, indifference and the peculiarities of his thought were primarily the consequences of his illness and not of the early attempts to treat it.

The popular view that anti-psychotics were chemical straight jackets that suppressed clear thinking and voluntary activity seems not to be borne out in Nash's case.

If anything, the only periods when he was relatively free of hallucinations, delusions and the erosion of will were the periods following either insulin treatment or the use of anti psychotics.

In other words, rather than reducing Nash to a zombie, medication seemed to reduce zombie like behavior. — Sylvia Nasar

Accordingly, France Had Voltaire, and his school of negative thinkers, and England (or rather Scotland) had the profoundest negative thinker on record, David Hume: a man, the peculiarities of whose mind qualified him to detect failure of proof, and want of logical consistency, at a depth which French skeptics, with their comparatively feeble powers of analysis and abstractions stop far short of, and which German subtlety alone could thoroughly appreciate, or hope to rival. — John Stuart Mill

I think all regions have had their peculiarities of speech rounded off by television, radio, and people travel so much more now. — Daniel Woodrell

Certain faults are necessary for the existence of the individual. We would resent it if old friends were to get rid of certain peculiarities. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

It would appear ... that moral phenomena, when observed on a great scale, are found to resemble physical phenomena; and we thus arrive, in inquiries of this kind, at the fundamental principle, that the greater the number of individuals observed, the more do individual peculiarities, whether physical or moral, become effaced, and leave in a prominent point of view the general facts, by virtue of which society exists and is preserved. — Adolphe Quetelet

The fact that we are human beings is infinitely more important than all the peculiarities that distinguish human beings from one another; it is never the given that confers superiorities: 'virtue', as the ancients called it, is defined on the level of 'that which depends on us'. — Simone De Beauvoir

Peculiar trait of the western people, thought Grant, that you could sleep with their wives, despoil their daughters, sponge on them, defraud them, do almost anything that would mean at least ostracism in normal society, and they would barely seem to notice it. But refuse to drink with them and you immediately became a mortal enemy. What the hell? He didn't even want to think about the west or its people and their peculiarities. Let them be. Once he was in Sydney, who knew, he might never come back. — Kenneth Cook

One of the chief peculiarities of this treatise is the doctrine that the true electric current, on which the electromagnetic phenomena depend, is not the same thing as the current of conduction, but that the time-variation of the electric displacement must [also] be taken into account ... — James Clerk Maxwell

You'll find many markets where bottlers of Pepsi and Coke both make a lot of money and many others where they destroy most of the profitability of the two franchises. That must get down to the peculiarities of individual adjustment to market capitalism. I think you 'd have to know the people involved to fully understand what was happening. — Charlie Munger

By suppressing differences and peculiarities, by eliminating different civilizations and cultures, progress weakens life and favors death — Octavio Paz

He liked the English and their peculiarities. He liked their stoicism under pressure; on the wall in his factory he kept a copy of a war poster emblazoned with the Crown of King George and underneath the words Keep Calm and Carry On. — Natasha Solomons

What merit there is in my thinking is derived from two peculiarities: (1) My inability to be familiar with anything. I simply can't take things for granted. (2) My endless patience. I assume that the only way to find an answer is to hang on long enough and keep groping. — Eric Hoffer

My parents were second cousins. That is enough to explain all of my peculiarities. — Sargent Shriver

Those who worship gold in a world so corrupt as this we live in have at least one thing to plead in defense of their idolatry
the power of their idol. It is true that, like other idols, it can neither move, see, hear, feel, nor understand; but, unlike other idols, it has often communicated all these powers to those who had them not, and annihilated them in those who had. This idol can boast of two peculiarities; it is worshipped in all climates, without a single temple, and by all classes, without a single hypocrite. — Charles Caleb Colton

Men are frightful nuisances at times; how much simpler life would be if we women did not have to make allowances for their little peculiarities. — Elizabeth Peters

Shakespeare is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirrour of manners and of life. His characters are not modified by the customs of particular places, unpractised by the rest of the world; by the peculiarities of studies or professions, which can operate but upon small numbers; or by the accidents of transient fashions or temporary opinions: they are the genuine progeny of common humanity, such as the world will always supply, and observation will always find. His persons act and speak by the influence of those general passions and principles by which all minds are agitated, and the whole system of life is continued in motion. In the writings of other poets a character is too often an individual; in those of Shakespeare it is commonly a species. — Samuel Johnson

More commonly but not exclusively to the like sex. It is a fact of some importance to us, that peculiarities appearing in the males of our domestic breeds are often transmitted, either exclusively or in a much greater degree, to the males alone. A much more important rule, which I think may be trusted, is that, at whatever period of life a peculiarity — Charles Darwin

When you work with web design companies in San Francisco, you end up with a bunch of twenty-somethings who have their own cultural peculiarities, including obscurity for its own sake. You give those guys a website for a banking institution and they screw it up, because they are designing for themselves. — Brenda Laurel

Not only is patriotism disdained, the very basis for pride in one's country and culture is systematically undermined in our educational institutions at all levels. The achievements of western civilization are buried in histories that portray every human sin found here as if they were peculiarities of the west. — Thomas Sowell

If we possessed a thorough knowledge of all the parts of the seed of any animal (e.g. man), we could from that alone, be reasons entirely mathematical and certain, deduce the whole conformation and figure of each of its members, and, conversely if we knew several peculiarities of this conformation, we would from those deduce the nature of its seed. — Rene Descartes

The primitive history of the species is all the more fully retained in its germ-history in proportion as the series of embryonic forms traversed is longer; and it is more accurately retained the less the mode of life of the recent forms differs from that of the earlier, and the less the peculiarities of the several embryonic states must be regarded as transferred from a later to an earlier period of life, or as acquired independently. — Fritz Muller

In reading The History of Nations, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities, their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first. — Charles Mackay

It is easier to analyze a work in its form, in its evolution, than simply to love it with all the living forces of our heart. It is easier to define its peculiarities and its details than to draw out of it its emotion, its thought. — Nadia Boulanger

The art of change-ringing is peculiar to the English, and, like most English peculiarities, unintelligible to the rest of the world. (The change-ringer's) passion - and it is a passion - finds its satisfaction in mathematical completeness and mechanical perfection, and as his bell weaves her way rhythmically up from lead to hinder place and down again, he is filled with the solemn intoxication that comes of intricate ritual faultlessly performed. — Dorothy L. Sayers

Peace or harmony between the sexes and individuals does not necessarily depend on a superficial equalization of human beings; nor does it call for the elimination of individual traits and peculiarities. The problem that confronts us today, and which the nearest future is to solve, is how to be one's self and yet in oneness with others, to feel deeply with all human beings and still retain one's own characteristic qualities. — Emma Goldman

A man must be strong enough to mold the peculiarity of his imperfections into the perfection of his peculiarities. — Walther Rathenau

The acts of daily forbearance, the headache, or toothache, or heavy cold; the tiresome peculiarities of husband or wife, the broken glass ... all of these sufferings, small as they are, if accepted lovingly, are most pleasing to God's Goodness. — Francis De Sales

All men lead their lives behind a wall of misunderstanding they have themselves built and most men die in silence and unnoticed behind the walls. Now and then a man, cut off from his fellows by the peculiarities of his nature, becomes absorbed in doing something that is personal, useful and beautiful. Word of his activities is carried over the walls. — Sherwood Anderson

I was counting the blades of grass, he said, by way of apology for his absentmindedness. It's a sort of pastime of mine. Rather irritating, I'm afraid. — W.G. Sebald

Even if national peculiarities in character and in laws occasion differences in the curve which the woman movement describes in the different countries, yet everywhere the movement has had the same causes, must follow the same main direction, and - sooner or later - must have the same effects. — Ellen Key

Even when the [schizophrenic] patient is striving to tell us, in as clear and straightforward a way as he knows how, the nature of his anxieties and his experiences, structured as they are in a radically different way from ours, the speech content is necessarily difficult to follow. Moreover, the formal elements of speech are in themselves ordered in unusual ways, and these formal peculiarities seem, at least to some extent, to be the reflection in language of the alternative ordering of his experience, with splits in it where we take coherence for granted, and the running together (confusion) of elements that we keep apart. — R.D. Laing

If we take the freedom to put a friend under our microscope, we thereby insulate him from many of his true relations, magnify his peculiarities, inevitably tear him into parts, and, of course, patch him very clumsily together again. What wonder, then, should we be frightened by the aspect of a monster. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

It is a great folly to hope that other men will harmonize with us; I have never hoped this. I have always regarded each man as an independent individual, whom I endeavored to understand with all his peculiarities, but from whom I desired no further sympathy. In this way have I been enabled to converse with every man, and thus alone is produced the knowledge of various characters and the dexterity necessary for the conduct of life. - JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE — Robert Greene

A poet has to adapt himself, more or less consciously,to the demands of his vocation, and hence the peculiarities of poets and the condition of inspiration which many people have said is near to madness ... The problem of creative writing is essentially one of concentration ... a focusing of the attention in a special way. — Stephen Spender

Human groupings have one main purpose: to assert everyone's right to be different, to be special, to think, feel and live in his or her own way. People join together in order to win or defend this right. But this is where a terrible, fateful error is born: the belief that these groupings in the name of a race, a God, a party or a State are the very purpose of life and not simply a means to an end. No! The only true and lasting meaning of the struggle for life lies in the individual, in his modest peculiarities and in his right to these peculiarities. — Vasily Grossman

Ecstacy stripped away the user's inhibitions to self-expression. On E, lies are inefficient, and the peculiarities or weaknesses they are meant to obscure no longer seem like offenses against nature. — Douglas Rushkoff

Her peculiarities must not be punished. — Johanna Spyri

Common sense is the average sensibility and intelligence of men undisturbed by individual peculiarities. — William Rounseville Alger

It would seem evident, therefore, that the secret of the American short story was the treatment of characteristic American life, with absolute knowledge of its peculiarities and sympathy with its method ... — Bret Harte

In his ... 'Geometrical peculiarities of the Pyramids', Ballard shows the relationship between the equal area theory and the golden number. After checking Herodotus' statement via dimensions Ballard concludes: 'I have therefore the authority of Herodotus to support the theory which I shall subsequently set forth, that this pyramid was the exponent of lines divided in mean and extreme ratio. — Roger Herz-Fischler

An educated memory depends on an organized system of associations; and its goodness depends on two of their peculiarities: first, on the persistency of the associations; and, second, on their number. — William James

Mentioning 'our days' as people of limited intelligence are fond of doing, imagining that they have discovered and appraised the peculiarities of 'our days' and that human characteristics change with the times ... — Leo Tolstoy

The Self-Educated are marked by stubborn peculiarities. — Isaac D'Israeli

At first cautiously, later indifferently, at last desperately, I wandered up the stairs and along the pavement of the inextricable palace. (Afterwards I learned that the width and height of the steps were not constant, a fact which made me understand the singular fatigue they produced). 'This palace is a fabrication of the gods,' I thought at the beginning. I explored the uninhabited interiors and corrected myself: ' The gods who built it have died.' I noted its peculiarities and said: 'The gods who built it were mad.' I said it, I know, with an incomprehensible reprobation which was almost remorse, with more intellectual horror than palpable fear ...
... 'This City' (I thought) 'is so horrible that its mere existence and perdurance, though in the midst of a secret desert, contaminates the past and the future and in some way even jeopardizes the stars. — Jorge Luis Borges

My personal peculiarities could not offend her since she was totally uninterested in my pretensions to be a person. — Iris Murdoch

The most perfect caricature is that which, on a small surface, with the simplest means, most accurately exaggerates, to the highest point, the peculiarities of a human being, at his most characteristic moment in the most beautiful manner. — Max Beerbohm

I have preached God's truth, so far as I know it, and I have not been ashamed of its peculiarities. That I might not stultify my testimony, I have cut myself clear of those who error from the faith, and even from those who associate with them. — Charles Haddon

But when other people criticise our own more exalted soul-flights by calling them "nothing but" expressions of our organic disposition, we feel outraged and hurt, for we know that, whatever be our organism's peculiarities, our mental states have their substantive value as revelations of the living truth; and we wish that all this medical materialism could be made to hold its tongue. — William James

Several of the peculiarities of WEIRD culture can be captured in this simple generalization: The WEIRDer you are, the more you see a world full of separate objects, rather than relationships. — Jonathan Haidt

Indeed, there is a counterfeit of love that often appears amongst those that are led by a spirit of delusion. There is commonly in the wildest enthusiasts a kind of union and affection that appears in them one towards another, arising from self-love, occasioned by their agreeing one with another in those things wherein they greatly differ from all others, and for which they are the objects of the ridicule of all the rest of mankind; which naturally will cause them so much the more to prize the esteem they observe in each other, of those peculiarities that make them the objects of others' contempt: — John F. MacArthur Jr.

For one of the peculiarities about prejudice is that it seems always to speak from the heart; it seems, in some daring way, to be speaking the truth, to be saying what others secretly believe, but do not have the courage to say themselves. And the man who speaks against prejudice can often come to seem like the peddler of shopworn banalities, while the voice of prejudice can seem bold and original; a lone voice with the power to drown out others, the power to subdue. — Aatish Taseer

To learn is as beautiful as to live.
Do not be afraid to lose yourself in minds greater than your own. Do not sit brooding anxiously over your own individuality or shut yourself out from influences that draw you powerfully for fear that they may sweep you along and submerge your innermost pet peculiarities in their mighty surge. Never fear. The individuality that can be lost in the sifting and reshaping of a healthy development is only a flaw; it is a branch grown in the dark, which is distinctive only so long as it retains its sickly pallor. And it is by this sound growth in yourself that you must live. Only the sound can grow great. — Jens Peter Jacobsen

Men lived and died all the time by the peculiarities of their soul, which they could never expect one another to understand. — Charles Finch

No reason to mention my peculiarities, my wandering in the maze these many years, shut away from sight. and from love, too. — Jeffrey Eugenides

One of the peculiarities of Delhi is that the term 'reform' is associated only with passing of laws in Parliament. In fact, the most important reforms are those needed, without new laws, at various level of the government, in work practices and procedures. — Narendra Modi

Everybody has that thing where they need to look one way but they come out looking another way and that's what people observe. You see someone on the street and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw. It's just extraordinary that we should have been given these peculiarities. Something is ironic in the world and it has to do with the fact that what you intend never comes out like you intend it. — Diane Arbus

Why should the peculiarities of human consciousness be the narrow standard by which other creatures are judged? — Gary Snyder

The reality of today, different as it is from the reality of my society one hundred years ago, is and can be important if we have the energy and the inclination to challenge it, to go out and engage with its peculiarities, with the things that we do not understand. The real danger is the tendency to retreat into the obvious, the tendency to be frightened by the richness of the world and to clutch what we always have understood. — Chinua Achebe

Despite our best efforts to clean it of its peculiarities, sex will never be either simple or nice in the ways we might like it to be. — Alain De Botton

Everything you've ever read of mine is first-draft. This is one of the peculiarities of the comics field. By the time you're working on chapter three of your masterwork, chapter one is already in print. You can't go back and suddenly decide to make this character a woman, or have this one fall out of a window. — Alan Moore

Little towns are like little children in this respect, that they interest most when they are enacting native peculiarities unconscious of beholders. Discovering themselves to be watched they attempt to be entertaining by putting on an antic, and produce disagreeable caricatures which spoil them. The — Thomas Hardy

This is going to hurt, but you will have to watch other couples be happier, richer and louder than you. Wait. No obstacle can withstand patience. Wait. You may not think so now, but there will come a time when you will be tempted to run away. Would that be right? Would that be fair? As every matriarch discovers, entire seasons will pass without reward. As your mate's peculiarities add up, what do you do? Wait!
pg 45 — Michael Ben Zehabe

There is no such thing as abstract Marxism, only concrete Marxism ... The Sinofication of Marxism - that is, making certain that its manifestation is imbued with Chinese peculiarities - is a problem that must be understood and solved by the party without delay. — Mao Zedong

Our house was an old Tudor mansion. My father was very particular in keeping the smallest peculiarities of his home unaltered. Thus the many peaks and gables, the numerous turrets, and the mullioned windows with their quaint lozenge panes set in lead, remained very nearly as they had been three centuries back. Over and above the quaint melancholy of our dwelling, with the deep woods of its park and the sullen waters of the mere, our neighborhood was thinly peopled and primitive, and the people round us were ignorant, and tenacious of ancient ideas and traditions. Thus it was a superstitious atmosphere that we children were reared in, and we heard, from our infancy, countless tales of horror, some mere fables doubtless, others legends of dark deeds of the olden time, exaggerated by credulity and the love of the marvelous. ("Horror: A True Tale") — John Berwick Harwood

One of the peculiarities of recent speculation, especially in America, is that ideas are abandoned in virtue of a mere change of feeling, without any new evidence or new arguments. We do not nowadays refute our predecessors, we pleasantly bid them good-bye. — George Santayana

It's the correct thing to say that a man needs no more than six feet of earth. But six feet is what a corpse needs, not a man. And they say, too, now, that if our intellectual classes are attracted to the land and yearn for a farm, it's a good thing. But these farms are just the same as six feet of earth. To retreat from town, from the struggle, from the bustle of life, to retreat and bury oneself in one's farm - it's not life, it's egoism, laziness, it's monasticism of a sort, but monasticism without good works. A man does not need six feet of earth or a farm, but the whole globe, all nature, where he can have room to display all the qualities and peculiarities of his free spirit. — Anton Chekhov

Television is the same as the telephone, and the same as the World Wide Web for that matter. People who become obsessed by the peculiarities of these communications media have simply failed to adjust to the shock of the old. People who bleat on about the 'artistic' potential of television qua television are equally deluded. — Will Self

For all its peculiarities and unevenness, the Bible has a simple story. God made man. Man rejected God. God won't give up until he wins him back. God will whisper. He will shout. He will touch and tug. He will take away our burdens; he'll even take away our blessings. If there are a thousand steps between us and him, he will take all but one. But he will leave the final one for us. The choice is ours. Please understand. His goal is not to make you happy. His goal is to make you His. His goal is not to get you what you want; it is to get you what you need. — Max Lucado

It's not up to the employer to decide or to figure out what religious problems you may have as an employee. In other words, if I'm inquiring about your religious peculiarities or whatever they may be, I'm invading your privacy about that. — Wayne Rogers

Similar (of course, far from identical) irritations in similar conditions call out similar reflexes; the more powerful the irritation, the sooner it overcomes personal peculiarities. To a tickle, people react differently, but to a red-hot iron, alike. As a steam-hammer converts a sphere and a cube alike into sheet metal, so under the blow of too great and inexorable events resistances are smashed and the boundaries of "individuality" lost. — Leon Trotsky

The configuration of the ocean-floor is of great interest to seismologists studying the movements of the Earth's crust. Oceanographers are also able to explain certain peculiarities of ocean currents by the contour of the ocean-bed. But enormous areas are still unexplored. — Paul J. H. Schoemaker

The physician must give heed to the region in which the patient lives, that is to say, to its type and peculiarities. — Paracelsus

Like any stage of the hydrologic process, we have our own peculiarities, our organs making us nothing more than water pools or springs of bizarre shape, filled with pulsing tubes and chambers. — Craig Childs

A man's penmanship is an unfailing index of his character, moral and mental, and a criterion by which to judge his peculiarities of taste and sentiments. — Bill Vaughan

The more perfect music we have, the more attractive the peculiarities and anomalies of human performance become. Perfection is a second rate idea. — T Bone Burnett

Classical music and pop are two different universes, each with its own difficulties, peculiarities, depth and artistic dignity. In Italy, I think there is a fairly clear line of demarcation, but the history of music is full of fusion. Popular and classical music have always found points of contact, of crossing, exchange, both drawing mutual profit. — Andrea Bocelli

It is simple nonsense to speak of the fixed tempo of any particular vocal phrase. Each voice has its peculiarities. — Anton Seidl

He had a few eccentricities himself and was tolerant of the peculiarities of others; indeed, he rather relished the ridiculous. — Carson McCullers

He is very changeful and abrupt." "True: no doubt he may appear so to a stranger, but I am so accustomed to his manner, I never think of it; and then, if he has peculiarities of temper, allowance should be made." "Why?" "Partly because it is his nature - and we can none of us help our nature; and partly because he has painful thoughts, no doubt, to harass him, and make his spirits unequal. — Charlotte Bronte

We all have our peculiarities," said Wallander. — Henning Mankell

Wherever there is a heart and an intellect, the diseases of the physical frame are tinged with the peculiarities of these. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

Look, here is a tree in the garden and every summer is produces apples, and we call it an apple tree because the tree "apples." That's what it does. Alright, now here is a solar system inside a galaxy, and one of the peculiarities of this solar system is that at least on the planet earth, the thing peoples! In just the same way that an apple tree apples! — Alan W. Watts

We have trouble estimating dramatic, exponential change. We cannot conceive that a piece of paper folded over 50 times could reach the sun. There are abrupt limits to the number of cognitive categories we can make and the number of people we can truly love and the number of acquaintances we can truly know. We throw up our hands at a problem phrased in an abstract way, but have no difficulty at all solving the same problem rephrased as a social dilemma. All of these things are expressions of the peculiarities of the human mind and heart, a refutation of the notion that the way we function and communicate and process information is straightforward and transparent. It is not. It is messy and opaque. — Malcolm Gladwell

Every period in history has its own peculiarities — Sunday Adelaja

Leadership both projects to the future and reflects upon the past. It bursts with possibilities, flaunts peculiarities, and occasionally defies probabilities. — Marcia Whicker

Change is freedom, change is life.
It's always easier not to think for oneself. Find a nice safe hierarchy and settle in. Don't make changes, don't risk disapproval, don't upset your syndics. It's always easiest to let yourself be governed.
There's a point, around age twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.
Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to go fulfil my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to go unbuild walls. — Ursula K. Le Guin

The peculiarities of my childhood, of constantly moving through so many different cultures, of always being the outsider, may have made me extraordinarily self-sufficient, but it had also bred a certain detachment, a sense that the world was a place to explore rather than truly inhabit. This manifested as a kind of shyness, even timidity. — Scott Anderson

One of the peculiarities of economics is that it still rests on a behavioral assumption-rational utility maximization-that has long since been rejected by sociologists and psychologists. — Lester Thurow

People of limited intelligence are fond of talking about "these days," imagining that they have discovered and appraised the peculiarities of "these days" and that human nature changes with the times. — Leo Tolstoy

A state of true and universal tolerance is best ensured by leaving alone the peculiarities of men and peoples. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The class murmured apprehensively, should she prove to harbor her share of the peculiarities indigenous to that region. — Harper Lee

The time we are living in has its own conditions, peculiarities and standards — Sunday Adelaja

Her beauty satisfied [his] artistic eye, her peculiarities piqued his curiosity, her vivacity lightened his ennui, and her character interested him by the unconscious hints it gave of power, pride and passion. So entirely natural and unconventional was she that he soon found himself on a familiar footing, asking all manner of unusual questions, and receiving rather piquant replies. — Louisa May Alcott

How does he look, Jeeves?"
"Sir?"
"What does Mr Bassington-Bassington look like?"
"It is hardly my place, sir, to criticize the facial peculiarities of your friends. — P.G. Wodehouse

In every particular state of the world, those nations which are strongest tend to prevail over the others; and in certain marked peculiarities the strongest tend to be the best. — Walter Bagehot