Walter Bagehot Quotes

131 Sourced Quotes

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 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
French is the patois of Europe; English is the language of the world.

Walter Bagehot
The purchaser [of a newspaper] desires an article which he can appreciate at sight; which he can lay down and say, 'An excellent article, very excellent; exactly my own sentiments.'

Walter Bagehot
Efficiency in an assembly requires a solid mass of steady votes; and these are collected by a deferential attachment to particular men, or by a belief in the principles that those men represent, and they are maintained by fear of those men - by the fear that if you vote against them, you may soon yourself have no vote at all.

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
The characteristic danger of great nations, like the Romans or the English, which have a long history of continuous creation, is that they may at last fail from not comprehending the great institutions which they have created.

Walter Bagehot
The less money lying idle the greater is the dividend.

Walter Bagehot
The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards

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

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
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
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 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
History is strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manliness, and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as soon as the movements of the world have a chance for it.

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

Walter Bagehot
In happy states, the Conservative party must rule upon the whole a much longer time than their adversaries. In well-framed politics, innovation—great innovation that is—can only be occasional. If you are always altering your house, it is a sign either that you have a bad house, or that you have an excessively restless disposition—there is something wrong somewhere.

Walter Bagehot
Dullness in matters of government is a good sign, and not a bad one—in particular, dullness in Parliamentary government is a test of its excellence, an indication of its success.

Walter Bagehot
In such constitutions [as England's] there are two parts…first, those which excite and preserve the reverence of the population—the dignified parts…and next, the efficient parts—those by which it, in fact, works and rules.

Walter Bagehot