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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
Somerset
Free
Permanent
Much
Essential
People
Mental
Essentials
Cynical
Large
Progressive
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Scale
Liberty
Scales
Quality
Stupidity
More quotes by Walter Bagehot
So long as there are earnest believers in the world, they will always wish to punish opinions, even if their judgment tells them it is unwise and their conscience that it is wrong.
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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 constitutional statesman is in general a man of common opinions and uncommon abilities.
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If you have to prove you are worthy of credit, your credit is already gone.
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The less money lying idle the greater is the dividend.
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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.
Walter Bagehot
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.
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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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One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.
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The essence of Toryism is enjoyment?but as far as communicating and establishing your creed are concernedtrya little pleasure. The way to keep up old customs is, to enjoy old customs the way to be satisfied with the present state of things is, to enjoy that state of things.
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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 best history is but like the art of Rembrandt it casts a vivid light on certain selected causes, on those which were best and greatest it leaves all the rest in shadow and unseen.
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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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Adventure is the life of commerce, but caution is the life of banking.
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Life is a compromise of what your ego wants to do, what experience tells you to do, and what your nerves let you do.
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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.
Walter Bagehot
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.
Walter Bagehot
Nations touch at their summits.
Walter Bagehot
Dullness in matters of government is a good sign, and not a bad one - in particular, dullness in parliamentary government is a test of its excellence, an indication of its success.
Walter Bagehot
All people are most credulous when they are most happy.
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