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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.

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
Courage
Wants
War
Experience
Nerves
Life
Ego
Compromise
Tells

More quotes by Walter Bagehot

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A democratic despotism is like a theocracy: it assumes its own correctness.
Walter Bagehot
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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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The best reason why Monarchy is a strong government is, that it is an intelligible government. The mass of mankind understand it, and they hardly anywhere in the world understand any other.
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The mystic reverence, the religious allegiance, which are essential to a true monarchy, are imaginative sentiments that no legislature can manufacture in any people.
Walter Bagehot
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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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Civilized ages inherit the human nature which was victorious in barbarous ages, and that nature is, in many respects, not at all suited to civilized circumstances.
Walter Bagehot
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Money is economic power.
Walter Bagehot
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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.
Walter Bagehot
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The great pleasure of life is doing for pleasure things I do not like to do.
Walter Bagehot
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It is often said that men are ruled by their imaginations but it would be truer to say they are governed by the weakness of their imaginations.
Walter Bagehot
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Great and terrible systems of divinity and philosophy lie round about us, which, if true, might drive a wise man mad.
Walter Bagehot
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History 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 have a chance for it.
Walter Bagehot
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To a great experience one thing is essential, an experiencing nature.
Walter Bagehot
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What impresses men is not mind, but the result of mind.
Walter Bagehot
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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.
Walter Bagehot
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Women--one half the human race at least--care fifty times more for a marriage than a ministry.
Walter Bagehot
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A highly developed moral nature joined to an undeveloped intellectual nature, an undeveloped artistic nature, and a very limited religious nature, is of necessity repulsive. It represents a bit of human nature a good bit, of course, but a bit only in disproportionate, unnatural and revolting prominence.
Walter Bagehot
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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.
Walter Bagehot
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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.
Walter Bagehot
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One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.
Walter Bagehot