Walter Bagehot Quotes

The purse strings tie us to our kind.

Great and terrible systems of divinity and philosophy lie round about us, which, if true, might drive a wise man mad.

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.

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.

Every banker knows that if he has to prove he is worthy of credit, in fact his credit is gone.

The being without an opinion is so painful to human nature that most people will leap to a hasty opinion rather than undergo it.

The soldier - that is, the great soldier - of to-day is not a romantic animal, dashing at forlorn hopes, animated by frantic sentiment, full of fancies as to a love-lady or a sovereign; but a quiet, grave man, busied in charts, exact in sums, master of the art of tactics, occupied in trivial detail; thinking, as the Duke of Wellington was said to do, most of the shoes of his soldiers; despising all manner of èclat and eloquence; perhaps, like Count Moltke, 'silent in seven languages'.

Progress would not have been the rarity it is if the early food had not been the late poison.

Writers, like teeth, are divided into incisors and grinders.

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.

The characteristic merit of the English constitutions is, that its dignified parts are very complicated and somewhat imposing, very old and rather venerable, while its efficient part, at least when in great and critical action, is decidedly simple and modern.

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

Nations touch at their summits.

A political country is like an American forest; you have only to cut down the old trees, and immediately new trees come up to replace them.

There seems to be an unalterable contradiction between the human mind and its employments. How can a soul be a merchant? What relation to an immortal being have the price of linseed, the brokerage on hemp? Can an undying creature debit petty expenses and charge for carriage paid? The soul ties its shoes; the mind washes its hands in a basin. All is incongruous.

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.

The best reason why Monarchy is a strong government is, that it is an intelligible government. The mass of mankind understand it, and they hardly anywhere in the world understand any other.

The most essential mental quality for a free people, whose liberty is to be progressive, permanent and on a large scale, is much stupidity.

Go ahead and do the impossible. It's worth the look on the faces of those who said you couldn't.

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.

So long as war is the main business of nations, temporary despotism - despotism during the campaign - is indispensable.

To a great experience one thing is essential, an experiencing nature.

So long as there are earnest believers in the world, they will always wish to punish opinions, even if their judgment tells them it is unwise and their conscience that it is wrong.

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

The abstract thinking of the world is never to be expected of persons in high places ...

What impresses men is not mind, but the result of mind.

Credit means that a certain confidence is given, and a certain trust reposed. Is that trust justified? And is that confidence wise? These are the cardinal questions. To put it more simply credit is a set of promises to pay; will those promises be kept?

Not only does a bureaucracy tend to under-government in point of quality; it tends to over-government in point of quantity.

Poverty is an anomaly to rich people; it is very difficult to make out why people who want dinner do not ring the bell.

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

Stupidity is nature's favorite resource for preserving consistency of opinion.

A cabinet is a combining committee, a hyphen which joins, a buckle which fastens, the legislative part of the state to the executive part of the state. In its origin it belongs to the one, in its functions it belongs to the other.

The peculiar essence of our banking system is an unprecedented trust between man and man. And when that trust is much weakened by hidden causes, a small accident may greatly hurt it, and a great accident for a moment may almost destroy it.

The business of banking ought to be simple. If it is hard it is wrong. The only securities which a banker, using money that he may be asked at short notice to repay, ought to touch, are those which are easily saleable and easily intelligible.

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

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

Woman absent is woman dead.

One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.

Business is really more agreeable than pleasure; it interests the whole mind, the aggregate nature of man more continuously, and more deeply. But it does not look as if it did.

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 legends more soft.

Nothing is more unpleasant than a virtuous person with a mean mind.

A Parliament is nothing less than a big meeting of more or less idle people.

Money is economic power.

Adventure is the life of commerce, but caution is the life of banking.

Life is a compromise of what your ego wants to do, what experience tells you to do, and what your nerves let you do.

In early times every sort of advantage tends to become a military advantage; such is the best way, then, to keep it alive. But the Jewish advantage never did so; beginning in religion, contrary to a thousand analogies, it remained religious.

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

We must not let daylight in upon the magic.

Persecution in intellectual countries produces a superficial conformity, but also underneath an intense, incessant, implacable doubt.

In my youth I hoped to do great things; now I shall be satisfied to get through without scandal.

You may talk of the tyranny of Nero and Tiberius; but the real tyranny is the tyranny of your next-door neighbor.

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.

Women
one half the human race at least
care fifty times more for a marriage than a ministry.

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 which that attention is divided between many, who are all doing uninteresting actions. Accordingly, 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 the understanding.

An influential member of parliament has not only to pay much money to become such, and to give time and labour, he has also to sacrifice his mind too - at least all the characteristics part of it that which is original and most his own.

The real essence of work is concentrated energy.

The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.

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.

The maxim of science is simply that of common sense-simple cases first; begin with seeing how the main force acts when there is as little as possible to impede it, and when you thoroughly comprehend that, add to it in succession the separate effects of each of the incumbering and interfering agencies.

It is the continual effort of the beginning that creates the hoarded energy of the end;

The reason that there are so few good books written is that so few people who write know anything.

The splitting of sovereignty into many parts amounts to there being no sovereign.

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

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

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.

One cannot make men good by Act of Parliament.

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

Our law very often reminds one of those outskirts of cities where you cannot for a long time tell how the streets come to wind about in so capricious and serpent-like a manner. At last it strikes you that they grew up, house by house, on the devious tracks of the old green lanes; and if you follow on to the existing fields, you may often find the change half complete.

Life is a school of probability.

All the inducements of early society tend to foster immediate action; all its penalties fall on the man who pauses; the traditional wisdom of those times was never weary of inculcating that "delays are dangerous," and that the sluggish man the man "who roasteth not that which he took in hunting" will not prosper on the earth, and indeed will very soon perish out of it. And in consequence an inability to stay quiet, an irritable desire to act directly, is one of the most conspicuous failings of mankind.

The best security for people's doing their duty is that they should not know anything else to do.

[A]n ancient and ever-altering constitution is like an old man who still wears with attached fondness clothes in the fashion of his youth: what you see of him is the same; what you do not see is wholly altered.

The habit of common and continuous speech is a symptom of mental deficiency.

The less money lying idle the greater is the dividend.

A severe though not unfriendly critic of our institutions said that the cure for admiring the House of Lords was to go and look at it.

Most men of business think Anyhow this system will probably last my time. It has gone on a long time, and is likely to go on still.

The cure for admiring the House of Lords is to go and look at it.