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Royalty is a government in which the attention of the nation is concentrated on one person doing interesting actions.

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
Person
Actions
Nation
Nations
Attention
Interesting
Monarchs
Action
Concentrated
Government
Royalty
Persons
Monarchy

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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.
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To a great experience one thing is essential, an experiencing nature.
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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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But of all nations in the world the English are perhaps the least a nation of pure philosophers.
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The peculiar essence of our banking system is an unprecedented trust between man and man. And when that trust is much weakened by hidden causes, a small accident may greatly hurt it, and a great accident for a moment may almost destroy it.
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Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.
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If you have to prove you are worthy of credit, your credit is already gone.
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The cure for admiring the House of Lords is to go and look at it.
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It is good to be without vices, but it is not good to be without temptations.
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So long as war is the main business of nations, temporary despotism - despotism during the campaign - is indispensable.
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Credit means that a certain confidence is given, and a certain trust reposed. Is that trust justified? And is that confidence wise? These are the cardinal questions. To put it more simply credit is a set of promises to pay will those promises be kept?
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A family on the throne is an interesting idea. It brings down the pride of sovereignty to the level of petty life.
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When great questions end, little parties begin.
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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.
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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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Women--one half the human race at least--care fifty times more for a marriage than a ministry.
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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 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.
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One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea. It...makes you think that after all, your favorite notions may be wrong, your firmest beliefs ill-founded....Naturally, therefore, common men hate a new idea, and are disposed more or less to ill-treat the original man who brings it.
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Business is really more agreeable than pleasure it interests the whole mind, the aggregate nature of man more continuously, and more deeply. But it does not look as if it did.
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