Quotes About Bagehot

History," Bagehot wrote, "is strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manliness, and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as soon as the movements of the world gave a chance for it.

Wit is part of the machinery of the intellect.

The old pagan has a sympathy with the religion of enthusiasm far above the reach of the modern Epicurean.

The soul ties its shoe; the mind washes its hands in a basin. All is incongruous.

Although I believe, like Bagehot, that central banks are inherently destabilising, that doesn't mean that you cannot have financial and economic instability without a central bank. Decentralised monetary systems, if poorly regulated, can also be unstable;

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

What was different about this crisis was that the institutional structure was different. It was not banks and depositors; it was broker-dealers and repo markets, money market funds and commercial paper. But the basic idea of providing short-term liquidity in order to stem a panic was very much what Bagehot envisioned when he wrote Lombard Street in 1873." 37