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The most essential mental quality for a free people, whose liberty is to be progressive, permanent and on a large scale, is much stupidity.
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
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Cynical
Large
Progressive
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Scale
Liberty
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Stupidity
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Free
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People
More quotes by Walter Bagehot
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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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.
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The purse strings tie us to our kind.
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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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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.
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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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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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No real English gentleman, in his secret soul, was ever sorry for the death of a political economist.
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The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards
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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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Conquest is the missionary of valor, and the hard impact of military virtues beats meanness out of the world.
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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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A Parliament is nothing less than a big meeting of more or less idle people.
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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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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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It is often said that men are ruled by their imaginations but it would be truer to say they are governed by the weakness of their imaginations.
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It has been said that England invented the phrase, 'Her Majesty's Opposition' that it was the first government which made a criticism of administration as much a part of the polity as administration itself. This critical opposition is the consequence of cabinet government.
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All people are most credulous when they are most happy.
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What we opprobriously call stupidity, though not an enlivening quality in common society, is nature's favorite resource for preserving steadiness of conduct and consistency of opinion.
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Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.
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