Quotes from 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.

The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards.

The habit of common and continuous speech is a symptom of mental deficiency.

Nothing is more unpleasant than a virtuous person with a mean mind.

You may talk of the tyranny of Nero and Tiberius; but the real tyranny is the tyranny of your next-door neighbor... Public opinion is a permeating influence, and it exacts obedience to itself; it requires us to think other men's thoughts, to speak other men's words, to follow other men's habits.

Life is a school of probability.

Writers, like teeth, are divided into incisors and grinders.

Men who do not make advances to women are apt to become victims to women who make advances to them.

The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do

it is the continual effort of the beginning that creates the hoarded energy of the end;

The abstract thinking of the world is never to be expected of persons in high places...

A]n ancient and ever-altering constitution is like an old man who still wears with attached fondness clothes in the fashion of his youth: what you see of him is the same; what you do not see is wholly altered.

The splitting of sovereignty into many parts amounts to there being no sovereign.

The greatest please in life is doing what people say you cannot do.

Custom is the first check on tyranny; that fixed routine of social life at which modern innovations chafe, and by which modern improvement is impeded, is the primitive check on base power.

The greatest plesure in life is doing what people say you cannot do

El mejor placer en la vida es hacer lo que la gente te dice que no puedes hacer.

Nothing is more unpleasant than a virtuous person with mean mind

In continental language, Lombard Street is an organization of credit, and we are to see if it is a good or bad organization in its kind, or if, as is most likely, it turn out to be mixed, what are its merits and what are its defects?

The most hopeless idleness is that most smoothed with excellent plans.

The efficient secret of the English Constitution may be described as the close union, the nearly complete fusion of the executive and legislative powers. According to the traditional theory, as it exists in all the books, the goodness of our constitution consists in the entire separation of the legislative and executive authorities, but in truth its merit consists in their singular approximation. The connecting link is the cabinet.

U]nder 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.

The English constitution, in a word, is framed on the principle of choosing a single sovereign authority, and making it good: the American, upon the principle of having many sovereign authorities, and hoping that their multitude may atone for their inferiority.

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