Walter Bagehot Quotes

131 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

Walter Bagehot
Not only does a bureaucracy tend to under-government in point of quality; it tends to over-government in point of quantity.

Walter Bagehot
Taken as a whole, the universe is absurd. There seems an unalterable contradiction between the human mind and its employments.

Walter Bagehot
The essence of Toryism is enjoyment?but as far as communicating and establishing your creed are concernedtrya little pleasure. The way to keep up old customs is, to enjoy old customs; the way to be satisfied with the present state of things is, to enjoy that state of things.

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
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
Great and terrible systems of divinity and philosophy lie round about us, which, if true, might drive a wise man mad.

Walter Bagehot
The peculiar essence of our banking system is an unprecedented trust between man and man. And when that trust is much weakened by hidden causes, a small accident may greatly hurt it, and a great accident for a moment may almost destroy it.

Walter Bagehot
In the faculty of writing nonsense, stupidity is no match for genius.

Walter Bagehot
Science tries to find in each bit of earth the record of the causes which made it precisely what it is; those forces have left their trace, she knows, as much as the tact and hand of the artist left their mark on a classical gem.

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
The cardinal maxim is, that any aid to a present bad Bank is the surest mode of preventing the establishment of a future good Bank.

Walter Bagehot
The best security for people's doing their duty is that they should not know anything else to do.

Walter Bagehot
Nature does not wear her most useful lessons on her sleeve; she only yields her most productive secrets, those which yield the most wealth and the most "fruit," to those who have gone through a long process of preliminary abstraction.

Walter Bagehot
No man has come so near our definition of a constitutional statesman - the powers of a first-rate man and the creed of a second-rate man.

Walter Bagehot
But of all nations in the world the English are perhaps the least a nation of pure philosophers.

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
Cabinet governments educate the nation; the presidential does not educate it, and may corrupt it.

Walter Bagehot
The caucus is a sort of representative meeting which sits voting and voting till they have cut out all the known men against whom much is to be said, and agreed on some unknown man against whom there is nothing known, and therefore nothing to be alleged.

Walter Bagehot
If you want to raise a certain cheer in the House of Commons, make a general panegyric on economy; if you want to invite a sure defeat, propose a particular saving.

Walter Bagehot
War both needs and generates certain virtues; not the highest, but what may be called the preliminary virtues, as valor, veracity, the spirit of obedience, the habit of discipline. Any of these, and of others like them, when possessed by a nation, and no matter how generated, will give them a military advantage, and make them more likely to stay in the race of nations.

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

Walter Bagehot