Quote

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

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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
Somerset
Wish
Judgement
Fear
Opinions
Even
Tells
Long
Believer
Always
Conscience
Unwise
World
Judgment
Punish
Opinion
Believers
Wrong
Earnest

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The purse strings tie us to our kind.
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Poverty is an anomaly to rich people it is very difficult to make out why people who want dinner do not ring the bell.
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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.
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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.
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What impresses men is not mind, but the result of mind.
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A political country is like an American forest you have only to cut down the old trees, and immediately new trees come up to replace them.
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The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards
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An element of exaggeration clings to the popular judgment: great vices are made greater, great virtues greater also interesting incidents are made more interesting, softer legends more soft.
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The cure for admiring the House of Lords is to go and look at it.
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In my youth I hoped to do great things now I shall be satisfied to get through without scandal.
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Men who do not make advances to women are apt to become victims to women who make advances to them.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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Royalty is a government in which the attention of the nation is concentrated on one person doing interesting actions.
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Under 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.
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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.
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A Parliament is nothing less than a big meeting of more or less idle people.
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