“War both needs and generates certain virtues; not the highest, but what may be called the preliminary virtues, as valour, veracity, the spirit of obedience, the habit of discipline. Any of these, and of others like them, when possessed by a nation, and no matter how generated, will give them a military advantage, and make them more likely to stay in the race of nations.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)
“When the excessively shy force themselves to be forward, they are frequently surprisingly unsubtle and overdirect and even rude: they have entered an extreme region beyond their normal personality, an area of social crime where gradations don’t count; unavailable to them are the instincts and taboos that booming extroverts, who know the territory of self-advancement far better, can rely on.”
—Nicholson Baker (b. 1957)