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

Walter Bagehot

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Walter Bagehot
Age: 51 †
Born: 1826
Born: February 3
Died: 1877
Died: March 24
Businessperson
Economist
Engineer
Journalist
Political Scientist
Politician
Sociologist
Langport
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Mean
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More quotes by Walter Bagehot

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In early times every sort of advantage tends to become a military advantage such is the best way, then, to keep it alive. But the Jewish advantage never did so beginning in religion, contrary to a thousand analogies, it remained religious.
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Life is a compromise of what your ego wants to do, what experience tells you to do, and what your nerves let you do.
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Efficiency in an assembly requires a solid mass of steady votes and these are collected by a deferential attachment to particular men, or by a belief in the principles that those men represent, and they are maintained by fear of those men - by the fear that if you vote against them, you may soon yourself have no vote at all.
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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.
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Royalty is a government in which the attention of the nation is concentrated on one person doing interesting actions.
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One cannot make men good by Act of Parliament.
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The greatest mistake is trying to be more agreeable than you can be.
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Dullness in matters of government is a good sign, and not a bad one - in particular, dullness in parliamentary government is a test of its excellence, an indication of its success.
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The real essence of work is concentrated energy - people who really have that in a superior degree by nature are independent of the forms and habits and artifices by which less able and less active people are kept up to their labors.
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No man has come so near our definition of a constitutional statesman - the powers of a first-rate man and the creed of a second-rate man.
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No real English gentleman, in his secret soul, was ever sorry for the death of a political economist.
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I'm not the kind of writer who's able to block out the world around me. I'm mindful of our own haves and have-nots, how our culture often blames and punishes the have-nots. I worry about our precarious economic and political climate.
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The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.
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Women--one half the human race at least--care fifty times more for a marriage than a ministry.
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The real essence of work is concentrated energy.
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Go ahead and do the impossible. It's worth the look on the faces of those who said you couldn't.
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The being without an opinion is so painful to human nature that most people will leap to a hasty opinion rather than undergo it.
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To a great experience one thing is essential, an experiencing nature.
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No great work has ever been produced except after a long interval of still and musing meditation.
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A constitutional statesman is in general a man of common opinions and uncommon abilities.
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