Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
A Parliament is nothing less than a big meeting of more or less idle people.
Walter Bagehot
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Walter Bagehot
Age: 51 †
Born: 1826
Born: February 3
Died: 1877
Died: March 24
Businessperson
Economist
Engineer
Journalist
Political Scientist
Politician
Sociologist
Langport
Somerset
Political
Nothing
Parliament
People
Idle
Meeting
Meetings
Politics
Less
Bigs
More quotes by Walter Bagehot
Business is really more agreeable than pleasure it interests the whole mind, the aggregate nature of man more continuously, and more deeply. But it does not look as if it did.
Walter Bagehot
Nations touch at their summits.
Walter Bagehot
You may talk of the tyranny of Nero and Tiberius but the real tyranny is the tyranny of your next-door neighbor.
Walter Bagehot
Adventure is the life of commerce, but caution is the life of banking.
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.
Walter Bagehot
A cabinet is a combining committee, a hyphen which joins, a buckle which fastens, the legislative part of the state to the executive part of the state. In its origin it belongs to the one, in its functions it belongs to the other.
Walter Bagehot
Stupidity is nature's favorite resource for preserving consistency of opinion.
Walter Bagehot
One cannot make men good by Act of Parliament.
Walter Bagehot
But of all nations in the world the English are perhaps the least a nation of pure philosophers.
Walter Bagehot
Nine tenths of modern science is in this respect the same: it is the produce of men whom their contemporaries thought dreamers - who were laughed at for caring for what did not concern them - who, as the proverb went, 'walked into a well from looking at the stars' - who were believed to be useless, if anyone could be such.
Walter Bagehot
The most essential mental quality for a free people, whose liberty is to be progressive, permanent and on a large scale, is much stupidity.
Walter Bagehot
So long as there are earnest believers in the world, they will always wish to punish opinions, even if their judgment tells them it is unwise and their conscience that it is wrong.
Walter Bagehot
Conquest is the missionary of valor, and the hard impact of military virtues beats meanness out of the world.
Walter Bagehot
Money is economic power.
Walter Bagehot
One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea. It...makes you think that after all, your favorite notions may be wrong, your firmest beliefs ill-founded....Naturally, therefore, common men hate a new idea, and are disposed more or less to ill-treat the original man who brings it.
Walter Bagehot
Every banker knows that if he has to prove that he is worthy of credit, however good may be his arguments, in fact his credit is gone: but what we have requires no proof.
Walter Bagehot
The business of banking ought to be simple. If it is hard it is wrong. The only securities which a banker, using money that he may be asked at short notice to repay, ought to touch, are those which are easily saleable and easily intelligible.
Walter Bagehot
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.
Walter Bagehot
The most intellectual of men are moved quite as much by the circumstances which they are used to as by their own will. The active voluntary part of a man is very small, and if it were not economized by a sleepy kind of habit, its results would be null.
Walter Bagehot
It has been said that England invented the phrase, 'Her Majesty's Opposition' that it was the first government which made a criticism of administration as much a part of the polity as administration itself. This critical opposition is the consequence of cabinet government.
Walter Bagehot
