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Walter Bagehot Quotes
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No orator ever made an impression by appealing to men as to their plainest physical wants, except when he could allege that those wants were caused by some one's tyranny.
Walter Bagehot
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Men who do not make advances to women are apt to become victims to women who make advances to them.
Walter Bagehot
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No great work has ever been produced except after a long interval of still and musing meditation.
Walter Bagehot
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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
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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
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Nothing is more unpleasant than a virtuous person with a mean mind.
Walter Bagehot
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It is an inevitable defect, that bureaucrats will care more for routine than for results.
Walter Bagehot
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It has been said, not truly, but with a possible approximation to truth, that in 1802 every hereditary monarch was insane.
Walter Bagehot
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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
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There is no method by which men can be both free and equal.
Walter Bagehot
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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
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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
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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
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In the faculty of writing nonsense, stupidity is no match for genius.
Walter Bagehot
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But of all nations in the world the English are perhaps the least a nation of pure philosophers.
Walter Bagehot
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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
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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
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The best security for people's doing their duty is that they should not know anything else to do.
Walter Bagehot
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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
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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
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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
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Taken as a whole, the universe is absurd. There seems an unalterable contradiction between the human mind and its employments.
Walter Bagehot
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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.
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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.
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Not only does a bureaucracy tend to under-government in point of quality; it tends to over-government in point of quantity.
Walter Bagehot
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Quote of the day
Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Walter Bagehot
Creative Commons
Born:
February 3, 1826
Died:
March 24, 1877
(aged 51)
Bio:
Walter Bagehot was a British journalist, businessman, and essayist, who wrote extensively about government, economics, and literature.
Known for:
The English Constitution (1867)
Physics and Politics (1872)
Biographical Studies
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