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The best history is but like the art of Rembrandt it casts a vivid light on certain selected causes, on those which were best and greatest it leaves all the rest in shadow and unseen.

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
Best
Shadow
Like
Rest
Greatest
Rembrandt
Causes
Selected
History
Vivid
Art
Unseen
Light
Casts
Certain
Leaves

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Capital must be propelled by self-interest it cannot be enticed by benevolence.
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Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.
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An ambassador is not simply an agent he is also a spectacle.
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We think of Euclid as of fine ice we admire Newton as we admire the peak of Teneriffe. Even the intensest labors, the most remote triumphs of the abstract intellect, seem to carry us into a region different from our own-to be in a terra incognita of pure reasoning, to cast a chill on human glory.
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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.
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The most essential mental quality for a free people, whose liberty is to be progressive, permanent and on a large scale, is much stupidity.
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The characteristic danger of great nations, like the Romans or the English which have a long history of continuous creation, is that they may at last fail from not comprehending the great institutions which they have created
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Throughout the greater part of his life George III was a kind of 'consecrated obstruction'.
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The greatest mistake is trying to be more agreeable than you can be.
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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.
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Nothing is more unpleasant than a virtuous person with a mean mind.
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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.
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Not only does a bureaucracy tend to under-government in point of quality it tends to over-government in point of quantity.
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What impresses men is not mind, but the result of mind.
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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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If you have to prove you are worthy of credit, your credit is already gone.
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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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Conquest is the missionary of valor, and the hard impact of military virtues beats meanness out of the world.
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The cure for admiring the House of Lords is to go and look at it.
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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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