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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.

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
Thoughts
Drink
Permeating
Influence
Exacts
Opinion
Habits
Public
Obedience
Words
Requires
Speak
Follow
Men
Habit

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A great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.
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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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The great pleasure of life is doing for pleasure things I do not like to do.
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The cure for admiring the House of Lords is to go and look at it.
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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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Men who do not make advances to women are apt to become victims to women who make advances to them.
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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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Most men of business think Anyhow this system will probably last my time. It has gone on a long time, and is likely to go on still.
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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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An inability to stay quiet is one of the conspicuous failings of mankind.
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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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Nations touch at their summits.
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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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Women--one half the human race at least--care fifty times more for a marriage than a ministry.
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Progress would not have been the rarity it is if the early food had not been the late poison.
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Persecution in intellectual countries produces a superficial conformity, but also underneath an intense, incessant, implacable doubt.
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You may talk of the tyranny of Nero and Tiberius but the real tyranny is the tyranny of your next-door neighbor.
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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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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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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.
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