Quotes from bagehot walter x

To make a single nation illustrate a principle, you must exaggerate much and you must omit much.

No barbarian can bear to see one of his nation deviate from the old barbarous customs and usages of their tribe. Very commonly all the tribe would expect a punishment from the gods if any one of them refrained from what was old, or began what was new.

The quaking bystanders in a superstitious age would soon have slain an isolated bold man in the beginning of his innovations.

Probably in most cases the greatest wisdom of a constitutional king would show itself in well-considered inaction.

Commerce is like war; its result is patent. Do you make money or do you not make it? There is as little appeal from figures as from battle.

Public opinion is the test of this polity; the best opinion which with its existing habits of deference, the nation will accept: if the free government goes by that opinion, it is a good government of its species; if it contravenes that opinion, it is a bad one.

The English people must miss a thousand minutiae that continental bureaucracies know even too well; but if they see a cardinal truth which those bureaucracies miss, that cardinal truth may greatly help the world.

After all, the original way of writing books may turn out to be the best. The first author, it is plain, could not have taken anything from books, since there were no books for him to copy from; he looked at things for himself.

It is only people who have had a tooth out, that really know the dentist's waiting room.

We have seen the immediate effect of the first exposition of the evangelical theory of faith. When applied to the case of the morbidly-despairing sinner, that theory has one argumentative imperfection which the logical sharpness of madness will soon discover and point out. The simple reply is: "I do not feel the faith which you describe. I wish I could feel it; but it is no use trying to conceal the fact, I am conscious of nothing like it."

There is, as yet, no Act of Parliament compelling a bona fide traveler to read. If you wish him to read, you must make reading pleasant. You must give him short views, and clear sentences.

Look at a railway stall; you see books of every color—blue, yellow, crimson, "ringstreaked, speckled, and spotted," on every subject, in every style, of every opinion, with every conceivable difference, celestial or sublunary, maleficent, beneficent—but all small. People take their literature in morsels, as they take sandwiches on a journey.

Taken as a whole, the universe is absurd. There seems 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 fall of butter, the tare on tallow, or the brokerage on hemp? Can an undying creature debit "petty expenses," and charge for "carriage paid"?

The English gentleman has ever loved a nice and classical scholarship. But these advantages were open only to persons who had received a very strict training, and who were voluntarily disposed to discipline themselves still more. To the mass of mankind the University was a "graduating machine"; the colleges, monopolist residences,—hotels without bells.

In the great histories there are two topics of interest—the man as a type of the age in which he lives,—the events and manners of the age he is describing; very often almost all the interest is the contrast of the two.

No one should be surprised at the prominence given to war. We are dealing with early ages: nation-making is the occupation of man in these ages, and it is war that makes nations.