Walter Bagehot Quotes & Sayings

#1. 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.

Walter Bagehot

#2. It has been said that England invented the phrase, 'Her Majesty's Opposition'; that it was the first government which made a criticism of administration as much a part of the polity as administration itself. This critical opposition is the consequence of cabinet government.

Walter Bagehot

#3. Money is economic power.

Walter Bagehot

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

Walter Bagehot

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

Walter Bagehot

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

Walter Bagehot

#7. Life is not a set campaign, but an irregular work, and the main forces in it are not overt resolutions, but latent and half-involuntary promptings.

Walter Bagehot

#8. Public opinion is a permeating influence, and it exacts obedience to itself; it requires us to drink other men's thoughts, to speak other men's words, to follow other men's habits.

Walter Bagehot

#9. Civilized ages inherit the human nature which was victorious in barbarous ages, and that nature is, in many respects, not at all suited to civilized circumstances.

Walter Bagehot

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

Walter Bagehot

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

Walter Bagehot

#12. 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.

Walter Bagehot

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

Walter Bagehot

#14. One cannot make men good by Act of Parliament.

Walter Bagehot

#15. The greatest mistake is trying to be more agreeable than you can be.

Walter Bagehot

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

Walter Bagehot

#17. 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.

Walter Bagehot

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

Walter Bagehot

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

Walter Bagehot

#20. 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.

Walter Bagehot

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

Walter Bagehot

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

Walter Bagehot

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

Walter Bagehot

#24. 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?

Walter Bagehot

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

Walter Bagehot

#26. The most intellectual of men are moved quite as much by the circumstances which they are used to as by their own will. The active voluntary part of a man is very small, and if it were not economized by a sleepy kind of habit, its results would be null.

Walter Bagehot

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

Walter Bagehot

#28. 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.

Walter Bagehot

#29. Conquest is the missionary of valor, and the hard impact of military virtues beats meanness out of the world.

Walter Bagehot

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

Walter Bagehot

#31. No man has come so near our definition of a constitutional statesman - the powers of a first-rate man and the creed of a second-rate man.

Walter Bagehot

#32. 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.

Walter Bagehot

#33. Nations touch at their summits.

Walter Bagehot

#34. 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.

Walter Bagehot

#35. The Ethiop gods have Ethiop lips, Bronze cheeks, and woolly hair; The Grecian gods are like the Greeks, As keen-eyed, cold and fair.

Walter Bagehot

#36. 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.

Walter Bagehot

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

Walter Bagehot

#38. The best history is but like the art of Rembrandt; it casts a vivid light on certain selected causes, on those which were best and greatest; it leaves all the rest in shadow and unseen.

Walter Bagehot

#39. We must not let daylight in upon the magic.

Walter Bagehot

#40. When great questions end, little parties begin.

Walter Bagehot

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

Walter Bagehot

#42. The caucus is a sort of representative meeting which sits voting and voting till they have cut out all the known men against whom much is to be said, and agreed on some unknown man against whom there is nothing known, and therefore nothing to be alleged.

Walter Bagehot

#43. 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

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

Walter Bagehot

#45. 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

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

Walter Bagehot

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

Walter Bagehot

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

Walter Bagehot

#49. 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.

Walter Bagehot

#50. All people are most credulous when they are most happy.

Walter Bagehot

#51. 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 half, which is unknown to us. We all come down to dinner, but each has a room to himself.

Walter Bagehot

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

Walter Bagehot

#53. Life is a school of probability.

Walter Bagehot

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

Walter Bagehot

#55. 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.

Walter Bagehot

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

Walter Bagehot

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

Walter Bagehot

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

Walter Bagehot

#59. It is good to be without vices, but it is not good to be without temptations.

Walter Bagehot

#60. The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.

Walter Bagehot

#61. 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.

Walter Bagehot

#62. 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

#63. 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

#64. Woman absent is woman dead.

Walter Bagehot

#65. The real essence of work is concentrated energy.

Walter Bagehot

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

Walter Bagehot

#67. 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 triumphs of the abstract intellect, seem to carry us into a region different from our own-to be in a terra incognita of pure reasoning, to cast a chill on human glory.

Walter Bagehot

#68. A constitutional statesman is in general a man of common opinions and uncommon abilities.

Walter Bagehot

#69. 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

#70. If you have to prove you are worthy of credit, your credit is already gone.

Walter Bagehot

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

Walter Bagehot

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

Walter Bagehot

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

Walter Bagehot

#74. 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

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

Walter Bagehot

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

Walter Bagehot

#77. The Sovereign has, under a constitutional monarchy such as ours, three rights - the right to be consulted, the right to encourage, the right to warn. And a king of great sense and sagacity would want no others.

Walter Bagehot

#78. Capital must be propelled by self-interest; it cannot be enticed by benevolence.

Walter Bagehot

#79. Throughout the greater part of his life George III was a kind of 'consecrated obstruction'.

Walter Bagehot

#80. An inability to stay quiet is one of the conspicuous failings of mankind.

Walter Bagehot

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

Walter Bagehot

#82. A democratic despotism is like a theocracy: it assumes its own correctness.

Walter Bagehot

#83. In every particular state of the world, those nations which are strongest tend to prevail over the others; and in certain marked peculiarities the strongest tend to be the best.

Walter Bagehot

#84. 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

#85. 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.

Walter Bagehot

#86. 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

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

Walter Bagehot

#88. 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.

Walter Bagehot

#89. The purse strings tie us to our kind.

Walter Bagehot

#90. The essence of Toryism is enjoyment?but as far as communicating and establishing your creed are concernedtrya little pleasure. The way to keep up old customs is, to enjoy old customs; the way to be satisfied with the present state of things is, to enjoy that state of things.

Walter Bagehot

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

Walter Bagehot

#92. 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.

Walter Bagehot