Best Walter Bagehot Quotes & Sayings

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

The real essence of work is concentrated energy. — Walter Bagehot

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

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

We must not let daylight in upon the magic. — Walter Bagehot

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

One cannot make men good by Act of Parliament. — Walter Bagehot

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

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

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

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

Life is a school of probability. — Walter Bagehot

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

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

Woman absent is woman dead. — Walter Bagehot

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

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

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. — Walter Bagehot

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

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. — Walter Bagehot

If you have to prove you are worthy of credit, your credit is already gone. — Walter Bagehot

Nations touch at their summits. — Walter Bagehot

Nine tenths of modern science is in this respect the same: it is the produce of men whom their contemporaries thought dreamers - who were laughed at for caring for what did not concern them - who, as the proverb went, 'walked into a well from looking at the stars' - who were believed to be useless, if anyone could be such. — Walter Bagehot

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

The purse strings tie us to our kind. — Walter Bagehot

Adventure is the life of commerce, but caution is the life of banking. — Walter Bagehot

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. — Walter Bagehot

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. — Walter Bagehot

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

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

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

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

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. — Walter Bagehot

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

Writers, like teeth, are divided into incisors and grinders. — Walter Bagehot

Throughout the greater part of his life George III was a kind of 'consecrated obstruction'. — Walter Bagehot

An inability to stay quiet is one of the conspicuous failings of mankind. — 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. — Walter Bagehot