Walter Bagehot quotes - page 4

Progress would not have been the rarity it is if the early food had not been the late poison. (Walter Bagehot)
Behind every man's external life, which he leads in company, there is another which he leads alone, and which he carries with him apart. 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. View quote
Walter Bagehot
One cannot make men good by Act of Parliament. View quote
Walter Bagehot
But of all nations in the world the English are perhaps the least a nation of pure philosophers. View quote
Walter Bagehot
The best security for people's doing their duty is that they should not know anything else to do. View quote
Walter Bagehot
In my youth I hoped to do great things now I shall be satisfied to get through without scandal. View quote
Walter Bagehot
The habit of common and continuous speech is a symptom of mental deficiency. View quote
Walter Bagehot
The great difficulty which history records is not that of the first step, but that of the second step. View quote
Walter Bagehot
The issue put before these electors was, which of two rich people will you choose? View quote
Walter Bagehot
Woman absent is woman dead. View quote
Walter Bagehot
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)
A democratic despotism is like a theocracy: it assumes its own correctness. View quote
Walter Bagehot
In the faculty of writing nonsense, stupidity is no match for genius. View quote
Walter Bagehot
Stupidity is nature's favorite resource for preserving consistency of opinion. View quote
Walter Bagehot
Money is economic power. View quote
Walter Bagehot
When great questions end, little parties begin. View quote
Walter Bagehot
The mystic reverence, the religious allegiance, which are essential to a true monarchy, are imaginative sentiments that no legislature can manufacture in any people. View quote
Walter Bagehot
Royalty is a government in which the attention of the nation is concentrated on one person doing interesting actions. View quote
Walter Bagehot
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. View quote
Walter Bagehot
A princely marriage is the brilliant edition of a universal fact, and, as such, it rivets mankind. View quote
Walter Bagehot
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)
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 economised by a sleepy kind of habit, its results would be null. View quote
Walter Bagehot
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. View quote
Walter Bagehot
It has been said that England invented the phrase, Her Majestys 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. View quote
Walter Bagehot
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. View quote
Walter Bagehot