Famous quotes containing the words common and/or defense:
“The British are a self-distrustful, diffident people, agreeing with alacrity that they are neither successful nor clever, and only modestly claiming that they have a keener sense of humour, more robust common sense, and greater staying power as a nation than all the rest of the world put together.”
—Quoted in Fourth Leaders from the Times (1950)
“He said, truly, that the reason why such greatly superior numbers quailed before him was, as one of his prisoners confessed, because they lacked a cause,—a kind of armor which he and his party never lacked. When the time came, few men were found willing to lay down their lives in defense of what they knew to be wrong; they did not like that this should be their last act in this world.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)