Walter Bagehot Quotes

88 quotes in 1158 categories

• The most essential mental quality for a free people, whose liberty is to be progressive, permanent and on a large scale, is much stupidity.
• The greatest mistake is trying to be more agreeable than you can be.
• The cure for admiring the House of Lords is to go and look at it.
• 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…
• 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…
• Royalty is a government in which the attention of the nation is concentrated on one person doing interesting actions. A Republic is a government in…
• The being without an opinion is so painful to human nature that most people will leap to a hasty opinion rather than undergo it.
• 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…
• Progress would not have been the rarity it is if the early food had not been the late poison.
• We see but one aspect of our neighbor, as we see but one side of the moon; in either case there is also a dark…
• An element of exaggeration clings to the popular judgment: great vices are made greater, great virtues greater also; interesting incidents are made more interesting, softer…
• The habit of common and continuous speech is a symptom of mental deficiency. It proceeds from not knowing what is going on in other people's…
• You may talk of the tyranny of Nero and Tiberius; but the real tyranny is the tyranny of your next-door neighbor.
• Adventure is the life of commerce, but caution is the life of banking.
• Every banker knows that if he has to prove he is worthy of credit, in fact his credit is gone.
• A man's mother is his misfortune, but his wife is his fault.
• 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,…
• Go ahead and do the impossible. It's worth the look on the faces of those who said you couldn't.
• We think of Euclid as of fine ice; we admire Newton as we admire the peak of Teneriffe. Even the intensest labors, the most remote…
• To a great experience one thing is essential, an experiencing nature.

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