Walter Bagehot Quotes

131 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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
You may talk of the tyranny of Nero and Tiberius; but the real tyranny is the tyranny of your next-door neighbor... Public opinion is a permeating influence, and it exacts obedience to itself; it requires us to think other men's thoughts, to speak other men's words, to follow other men's habits.

Walter Bagehot
In every particular state of the world, those nations which are strongest tend to prevail over the others; and in certain marked peculiarities the strongest tend to be the best.

Walter Bagehot
Business is really more agreeable than pleasure; it interests the whole mind, the aggregate nature of man more continuously, and more deeply. But it does not look as if it did.

Walter Bagehot
Throughout the greater part of his life George III was a kind of 'consecrated obstruction'.

Walter Bagehot
We think of Euclid as of fine ice; we admire Newton as we admire the peak of Teneriffe. Even the intensest labors, the most remote triumphs of the abstract intellect, seem to carry us into a region different from our own-to be in a terra incognita of pure reasoning, to cast a chill on human glory.

Walter Bagehot
The business of banking ought to be simple. If it is hard it is wrong. The only securities which a banker, using money that he may be asked at short notice to repay, ought to touch, are those which are easily saleable and easily intelligible.

Walter Bagehot
Years of acquiescing in proposals as to which he has not been consulted, of voting for measures which he did not frame, and in the wisdom of which he often did not believe, of arguing for proposals from half of which he dissents—usually de-intellectualize a parliamentary statesman before he comes to half his power.

Walter Bagehot
The greatest enjoyment possible to man was that which this philosophy promises its votaries—the pleasure of being always right, and always reasoning—without ever being bound to look at anything.

Walter Bagehot
Credit means that a certain confidence is given, and a certain trust reposed. Is that trust justified? and is that confidence wise? These are the cardinal questions. To put it more simply credit is a set of promises to pay; will those promises be kept?

Walter Bagehot
The great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.

Walter Bagehot
Life is not a set campaign, but an irregular work, and the main forces in it are not overt resolutions, but latent and half-involuntary promptings.

Walter Bagehot
Wordsworth, Tennyson and Browning; or, pure, ornate, and grotesque art in English poetry.

Walter Bagehot
If you please, sir, tell me what you do not know...

Walter Bagehot
The being without an opinion is so painful to human nature that most people will leap to a hasty opinion rather than undergo it.

Walter Bagehot
In early times every sort of advantage tends to become a military advantage; such is the best way, then, to keep it alive. But the Jewish advantage never did so; beginning in religion, contrary to a thousand analogies, it remained religious.

Walter Bagehot
Progress would not have been the rarity it is if the early food had not been the late poison.

Walter Bagehot