Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards
Walter Bagehot
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Walter Bagehot
Age: 51 †
Born: 1826
Born: February 3
Died: 1877
Died: March 24
Businessperson
Economist
Engineer
Journalist
Political Scientist
Politician
Sociologist
Langport
Somerset
Institutions
Civilization
History
Strewn
Invaluable
Culture
Reincarnation
Firsts
Deadly
First
Afterwards
Whole
Creeds
More quotes by Walter Bagehot
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.
Walter Bagehot
One cannot make men good by Act of Parliament.
Walter Bagehot
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
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.
Walter Bagehot
Go ahead and do the impossible. It's worth the look on the faces of those who said you couldn't.
Walter Bagehot
A constitutional statesman is in general a man of common opinions and uncommon abilities.
Walter Bagehot
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.
Walter Bagehot
Not only does a bureaucracy tend to under-government in point of quality it tends to over-government in point of quantity.
Walter Bagehot
Royalty is a government in which the attention of the nation is concentrated on one person doing interesting actions.
Walter Bagehot
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
You may talk of the tyranny of Nero and Tiberius but the real tyranny is the tyranny of your next-door neighbor.
Walter Bagehot
The caucus is a sort of representative meeting which sits voting and voting till they have cut out all the known men against whom much is to be said, and agreed on some unknown man against whom there is nothing known, and therefore nothing to be alleged.
Walter Bagehot
In my youth I hoped to do great things now I shall be satisfied to get through without scandal.
Walter Bagehot
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.
Walter Bagehot
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.
Walter Bagehot
The purse strings tie us to our kind.
Walter Bagehot
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.
Walter Bagehot
The great pleasure of life is doing for pleasure things I do not like to do.
Walter Bagehot
It has been said that England invented the phrase, 'Her Majesty's Opposition'.
Walter Bagehot
Nations touch at their summits.
Walter Bagehot
