Quotes from Walter Bagehot

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.

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.

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.

Royalty is a government in which the attention of the nation is concentrated on one person doing interesting actions.

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

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

A man's mother is his misfortune, but his wife is his fault.

We must not let daylight in upon the magic.

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

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

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.

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.

Strong beliefs win strong men, and then make them stronger.

The great breeding people have gone out and multiplied ; colonies in every clime attest our success; French is the patois of Europe; English is the language of the world.

A certain nonchalant ease pervades our modern world: we affect an indifference we scarcely feel; our talk is light almost to affectation, our best writing is the same -- we suggest rather than elaborate, hint rather than declaim.

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

Action is a business of risk; the real question is the magnitude of that risk.

An inability to stay quiet, an irritable desire to act directly, is one of the most conspicuous failings of mankind.

No one will ever comprehend the arrested civilizations unless he sees the strict dilemma of early society. Either men had no law at all, and lived in confused tribes, hardly hanging together, or they had to obtain a fixed law by processes of incredible difficulty. Those who surmounted that difficulty soon destroyed all those that lay in their way who did not.

As soon as discussion begins the savage propensities of men break forth; even in modern communities, where those propensities, too, have been weakened by ages of culture, and repressed by ages of obedience, as soon as a vital topic for discussion is well started the keenest and most violent passions break forth. Easily destroyed as are early free states by forces from without, they are even more liable to destruction by forces from within.

A great painter of men must (as has been said) have a faculty of conversing, but he must also have a capacity for solitude. There is much of mankind that a man can only learn from himself.

But in early time, when writing is difficult, reading rare, and representation undiscovered, those who are to be guided by the discussion must hear it with their own ears, must be brought face to face with the orator, and must feel his influence for themselves.

There is one thing which no one will permit to be treated lightly—himself.

The military habit makes man think far too much of definite action and far too little of brooding meditation: 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.