Walter Bagehot - English Quotes

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

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

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

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

Walter Bagehot
The natural impulse of the English people is to resist authority.

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

Walter Bagehot