Walter Bagehot Quotes

131 Sourced Quotes

Poverty is an anomaly to rich people; it is very difficult to make out why people who want dinner do not ring the bell.

Walter Bagehot
A bureaucracy is sure to think that its duty is to augment official power, official business, or official members, rather than to leave free the energies of mankind; it overdoes the quantity of government, as well as impairs its quality.

Walter Bagehot
The habit of common and continuous speech is a symptom of mental deficiency. It proceeds from not knowing what is going on in other people's minds.

Walter Bagehot
It is good to be without vices, but it is not good to be without temptations.

Walter Bagehot
So long as war is the main business of nations, temporary despotism — despotism during the campaign — is indispensable.

Walter Bagehot
The best reason why Monarchy is a strong government is, that it is an intelligible government. The mass of mankind understand it, and they hardly anywhere in the world understand any other.

Walter Bagehot
One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.

Walter Bagehot
Conquest is the missionary of valor, and the hard impact of military virtues beats meanness out of the world.

Walter Bagehot
A severe though not unfriendly critic of our institutions said that 'the cure for admiring the House of Lords was to go and look at it.'

Walter Bagehot
No great work has ever been produced except after a long interval of still and musing meditation.

Walter Bagehot
The characteristic of the English Monarchy is that it retains the feelings by which the heroic kings governed their rude age, and has added the feelings by which the constitutions of later Greece ruled in more refined ages.

Walter Bagehot
What we opprobriously call stupidity, though not an enlivening quality in common society, is nature's favorite resource for preserving steadiness of conduct and consistency of opinion.

Walter Bagehot
A slight daily unconscious luxury is hardly ever wanting to the dwellers in civilization; like the gentle air of a genial climate, it is a perpetual minute enjoyment.

Walter Bagehot
The truth is that the propensity of man to imitate what is before him is one of the strongest parts of his nature.

Walter Bagehot
There is no method by which men can be both free and equal.

Walter Bagehot
The order of nobility is of great use, too, not only in what it creates, but in what it prevents. It prevents the rule of wealth—the religion of gold. This is the obvious and natural idol of the Anglo-Saxon.

Walter Bagehot
It has been said, not truly, but with a possible approximation to truth, that in 1802 every hereditary monarch was insane.

Walter Bagehot
It is an inevitable defect, that bureaucrats will care more for routine than for results.

Walter Bagehot
Nothing is more unpleasant than a virtuous person with a mean mind.

Walter Bagehot
An ambassador is not simply an agent; he is also a spectacle.

Walter Bagehot
An Opposition, on coming into power, is often like a speculative merchant whose bills become due. Ministers have to make good their promises, and they find a difficulty in so doing.

Walter Bagehot
It is often said that men are ruled by their imaginations; but it would be truer to say they are governed by the weakness of their imaginations.

Walter Bagehot
By the structure of the world we often want, at the sudden occurrence of a grave tempest, to change the helmsman—to replace the pilot of the calm by the pilot of the storm.

Walter Bagehot
Capital must be propelled by self-interest; it cannot be enticed by benevolence.

Walter Bagehot
A political country is like an American forest: you only have to cut down the old trees, and immediately new trees come up to replace them; the seeds were waiting in the ground, and they began to grow as soon as the withdrawal of the old ones brought in light and air.

Walter Bagehot
No real English gentleman, in his secret soul, was ever sorry for the death of a political economist.

Walter Bagehot
To a great experience one thing is essential — an experiencing nature.

Walter Bagehot
The most essential mental quality for a free people, whose liberty is to be progressive, permanent and on a large scale, is much stupidity.

Walter Bagehot
Under a Presidential government, a nation has, except at the electing moment, no influence; it has not the ballot-box before it; its virtue is gone, and it must wait till its instant of despotism again returns.

Walter Bagehot
A princely marriage is the brilliant edition of a universal fact, and, as such, it rivets mankind.

Walter Bagehot