“I have no sympathy with the idleness that would contrast this fighting with the teachings of the pulpit; for, perchance, more virtue is being practiced at Sevastopol than in many years of peace. It is a pity that we seem to require a war, from time to time, to assure us that there is any manhood still left in man.”
-Henry David Thoreau. Letter, February 7, 1855, to Thomas Cholmondeley, in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, vol. 6, pp. 249-250, Houghton Mifflin (1906).
