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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.

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
Political
Monarchy
Government
Hardly
Best
Anywhere
Reason
Mass
World
Mankind
Politics
Intelligible
Understand
Monarchs
Strong
Royalty

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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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We must not let daylight in upon the magic.
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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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An inability to stay quiet is one of the conspicuous failings of mankind.
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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.
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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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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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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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But of all nations in the world the English are perhaps the least a nation of pure philosophers.
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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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Conquest is the missionary of valor, and the hard impact of military virtues beats meanness out of the world.
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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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No great work has ever been produced except after a long interval of still and musing meditation.
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The cardinal maxim is, that any aid to a present bad Bank is the surest mode of preventing the establishment of a future good Bank.
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In the faculty of writing nonsense, stupidity is no match for genius.
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Public opinion is a permeating influence, and it exacts obedience to itself it requires us to drink other men's thoughts, to speak other men's words, to follow other men's habits.
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Royalty is a government in which the attention of the nation is concentrated on one person doing interesting actions.
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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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