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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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Walter Bagehot
Age: 51 †
Born: 1826
Born: February 3
Died: 1877
Died: March 24
Businessperson
Economist
Engineer
Journalist
Political Scientist
Politician
Sociologist
Langport
Somerset
True
Imaginative
People
Sentiments
Reverence
Essential
Manufacture
Essentials
Monarchy
Atheism
Legislature
Religious
Mystic
Religion
Allegiance

More quotes by Walter Bagehot

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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.
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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.
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An inability to stay quiet is one of the conspicuous failings of mankind.
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If you have to prove you are worthy of credit, your credit is already gone.
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Go ahead and do the impossible. It's worth the look on the faces of those who said you couldn't.
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The most intellectual of men are moved quite as much by the circumstances which they are used to as by their own will. The active voluntary part of a man is very small, and if it were not economized by a sleepy kind of habit, its results would be null.
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It has been said that England invented the phrase, 'Her Majesty's Opposition'.
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A great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.
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The maxim of science is simply that of common sense-simple cases first begin with seeing how the main force acts when there is as little as possible to impede it, and when you thoroughly comprehend that, add to it in succession the separate effects of each of the incumbering and interfering agencies.
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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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Poverty is an anomaly to rich people it is very difficult to make out why people who want dinner do not ring the bell.
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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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A cabinet is a combining committee, a hyphen which joins, a buckle which fastens, the legislative part of the state to the executive part of the state. In its origin it belongs to the one, in its functions it belongs to the other.
Walter Bagehot
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No real English gentleman, in his secret soul, was ever sorry for the death of a political economist.
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We see but one aspect of our neighbor, as we see but one side of the moon in either case there is also a dark half, which is unknown to us. We all come down to dinner, but each has a room to himself.
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Capital must be propelled by self-interest it cannot be enticed by benevolence.
Walter Bagehot
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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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One cannot make men good by Act of Parliament.
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An ambassador is not simply an agent he is also a spectacle.
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The most melancholy of human reflections, perhaps, is that, on the whole, it is a question whether the benevolence of mankind does most good or harm.
Walter Bagehot