"A man's vanity tells him what is honor, a man's conscience what is justice." -Walter Savage Landor
Walter Savage Landor was an English writer who is most remembered for the prose series Imaginary Conversations, from which this quote comes. The six-volume work, which Landor wrote while living in Florence, contains fictional dialogues with famous figures from that city and from elsewhere in antiquity. Landor invents and attributes various sayings to them that are commensurate with their character. "Men, like nails, lose their usefulness when they lose their direction and begin to bend: such nails are then thrown into the dust or into the furnace," Landor imagines Cromwell saying.
