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Walter Bagehot Quotes
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The soldier of today is a quiet, grave man [...] perhaps like Count Moltke, 'silent in seven languages'.
Walter Bagehot
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To a great experience one thing is essential — an experiencing nature.
Walter Bagehot
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Capital must be propelled by self-interest; it cannot be enticed by benevolence.
Walter Bagehot
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No real English gentleman, in his secret soul, was ever sorry for the death of a political economist.
Walter Bagehot
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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.
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A princely marriage is the brilliant edition of a universal fact, and, as such, it rivets mankind.
Walter Bagehot
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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
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Throughout the greater part of his life George III was a kind of 'consecrated obstruction'.
Walter Bagehot
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Quote of the day
Now if the harvest is over, And the world cold, Give me the bonus of laughter, As I lose hold.
John Betjeman
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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