The Government should take a firm, bold line. This delay - this uncertainty, by which, abroad, we are losing our prestige and our position, while Russia is advancing and will be before Constantinople in no time! Then the Government will be fearfully blamed and the Queen so humiliated that she thinks she would abdicate at once.

The Arab-Israeli conflict is also in many ways a conflict about status: it's a war between two peoples who feel deeply humiliated by the other who want the other to respect them. Battles over status can be even more intractable than those over land or water or oil.

Charity never humiliated him who profited from it nor ever bound him by the chains of gratitude since it was not to him but to God that the gift was made.