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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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Walter Bagehot
Age: 51 †
Born: 1826
Born: February 3
Died: 1877
Died: March 24
Businessperson
Economist
Engineer
Journalist
Political Scientist
Politician
Sociologist
Langport
Somerset
Kind
Writer
Nots
World
Worry
Blames
Economic
Punishes
Culture
Mindful
Often
Precarious
Political
Block
Around
Blame
Able
Climate
Haves

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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 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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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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When great questions end, little parties begin.
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We must not let daylight in upon the magic.
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The habit of common and continuous speech is a symptom of mental deficiency. It proceeds from not knowing what is going on in other people's minds.
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An inability to stay quiet is one of the conspicuous failings of mankind.
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It is good to be without vices, but it is not good to be without temptations.
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Throughout the greater part of his life George III was a kind of 'consecrated obstruction'.
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But of all nations in the world the English are perhaps the least a nation of pure philosophers.
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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.
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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 security for people's doing their duty is that they should not know anything else to do.
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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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Life is not a set campaign, but an irregular work, and the main forces in it are not overt resolutions, but latent and half-involuntary promptings.
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The characteristic merit of the English constitutions is, that its dignified parts are very complicated and somewhat imposing, very old and rather venerable, while its efficient part, at least when in great and critical action, is decidedly simple and modern.
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The cure for admiring the House of Lords is to go and look at it.
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The greatest mistake is trying to be more agreeable than you can be.
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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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