[Kartar] Lalvani does not undervalue the achievements of the Mughal Empire, but its canals and irrigation tanks and roads had fallen into decay after the terrible Persian and Afghan invasions of the mid-18th century. For his part, [Shashi] Tharoor cannot forbear to praise the achievements of men like Arthur Cotton, whose Godavari Delta irrigation scheme remains much as he left it in 1852.

The powerful and the fortunate are very fond of the maxim, where there's a will there's a way; and they rarely use it without expressing in very clear terms a cold, insolent, and uncharitable judgment upon exertions they are themselves not called upon to make, while they modestly declare that such exertions, if by them made, would be triumphant. They say, in sort, to the weak and unprosperous—You might succeed if you would, for effort is success, and we should find a certain and easy conquest where you have met but baffled hopes and continual defeat!

And there he learned of things and haps to come, / To give foreknowledge true, and certain doom.

Whatever its effect on the soldiers, Paul's sermon on Areopagus has not been forgotten in Mars Hill, Maine, where the town's other doctor wears a cross in his lapel and has personally been obstetricated twice