Walter Bagehot Quotes

131 Sourced Quotes

Whatever expenditure is sanctioned—even when it is sanctioned against the ministry's wish—the ministry must find the money. Accordingly, they have the strongest motive to oppose extra outlay.... The ministry is (so to speak) the breadwinner of the political family, and has to meet the cost of philanthropy and glory; just as the head of a family has to pay for the charities of his wife and the toilette of his daughters.

Walter Bagehot
The whole life of English politics is the action and reaction between the ministry and the parliament.

Walter Bagehot
Writers, like teeth, are divided into incisors and molars. Sydney Smith was a "molar."

Walter Bagehot
A schoolmaster should have an atmosphere of awe, and walk wonderingly, as if he was amazed at being himself.

Walter Bagehot
A family on the throne is an interesting idea. It brings down the pride of sovereignty to the level of petty life.

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
The most melancholy of human reflections, perhaps, is that, on the whole, it is a question whether the benevolence of mankind does most good or harm.

Walter Bagehot
Civilized ages inherit the human nature which was victorious in barbarous ages, and that nature is, in many respects, not at all suited to civilized circumstances.

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
Under a cabinet constitution at a sudden emergency this people can choose a ruler for the occasion. It is quite possible and even likely that he would not be ruler before the occasion. The great qualities, the imperious will, the rapid energy, the eager nature fit for a great crisis are not required—are impediments—in common times. A Lord Liverpool is better in everyday politics than a Chatham—a Louis Philippe far better than a Napoleon. By the structure of the world we 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
The House of Commons lives in a state of perpetual potential choice: at any moment it can choose a ruler and dismiss a ruler. And therefore party is inherent in it, is bone of its bone, and breath of its breath.

Walter Bagehot
He believes, with all his heart and soul and strength, that there is such a thing as truth; he has the soul of a martyr with the intellect of an advocate.

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

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
The soldier of today is a quiet, grave man [...] perhaps like Count Moltke, 'silent in seven languages'.

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

Walter Bagehot
So long as the human heart is strong and the human reason weak, Royalty will be strong because it appeals to diffused feeling, and Republics weak because they appeal to understanding.

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
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
The apparent rulers of the English nation are like the most imposing personages of the a splendid procession; it is by them that the mob are influenced; it is they who the inspectors cheer. The real rulers are secreted in second hand carriages; no one cares for them or asks about them, but they are obeyed implicitly and unconsciously by reason of the splendour of those who eclipsed and preceded them.

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

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

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

Walter Bagehot
The mystic reverence, the religious allegiance, which are essential to a true monarchy, are imaginative sentiments that no legislature can manufacture in any people.

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

Walter Bagehot
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
Men who do not make advances to women are apt to become victims to women who make advances to them.

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

Walter Bagehot