Quotes from bagehot walter xiv

There are some that are bold and strong and incessant and energetic and hard, and to these is the world's glory; and some are timid and meek and impotent and cowardly and rejected and obscure.

Theodora never married. Love did not, however, kill her—at least, if it did, it was a long time at the task, as she survived these events more than sixty years. She never, seemingly, forgot the past.

The thirst of the soul was to be satisfied, the deep torture of the spirit to have rest.

The sort of taxation tried in America, that of taxing everything, and seeing what every thing would yield, could not have been tried under a Government delicately and quickly sensitive to public opinion.

The mode of governing the country, according to the existing laws, is mostly worn into a rut, and most administrations move in it because it is easier to move there than anywhere else.

The defect of this religion is, that it is too abstract for the practical, and too bare for the musing.

Respect is traditional; it is given not to what is proved to be good, but to what is known to be old.

On few subjects has more nonsense been written than on the learning of Shakespeare.

No two characters could, indeed, be found more opposite than the open, eager, buoyant poet, and the dark, threatening, unbelieving critic.

It is an inevitable defect, that bureaucrats will care more for routine than for results.

A settled and practical people are distinctly in favor of heavy relaxations, placid prolixities, slow comforts.

We have voluntary show enough already in London; we do not wish to have it encouraged and intensified, but quieted and mitigated.

There is nothing in the life before us comparable in interest to the tragic, gradual cracking of the great mind; the overtasking of the great capital, and the ensuing failure; the spectacle of heaving genius breaking in the contact with misfortune.