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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
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Cynical
Large
Progressive
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Scale
Liberty
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Quality
Stupidity
Free
Permanent
Much
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People
Mental
More quotes by Walter Bagehot
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.
Walter Bagehot
A severe though not unfriendly critic of our institutions said that the cure for admiring the House of Lords was to go and look at it.
Walter Bagehot
Great and terrible systems of divinity and philosophy lie round about us, which, if true, might drive a wise man mad.
Walter Bagehot
An inability to stay quiet is one of the conspicuous failings of mankind.
Walter Bagehot
What impresses men is not mind, but the result of mind.
Walter Bagehot
Life is a compromise of what your ego wants to do, what experience tells you to do, and what your nerves let you do.
Walter Bagehot
Poverty is an anomaly to rich people it is very difficult to make out why people who want dinner do not ring the bell.
Walter Bagehot
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.
Walter Bagehot
Business is really more agreeable than pleasure it interests the whole mind, the aggregate nature of man more continuously, and more deeply. But it does not look as if it did.
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
Nine tenths of modern science is in this respect the same: it is the produce of men whom their contemporaries thought dreamers - who were laughed at for caring for what did not concern them - who, as the proverb went, 'walked into a well from looking at the stars' - who were believed to be useless, if anyone could be such.
Walter Bagehot
The less money lying idle the greater is the dividend.
Walter Bagehot
A political country is like an American forest you have only to cut down the old trees, and immediately new trees come up to replace them.
Walter Bagehot
A democratic despotism is like a theocracy: it assumes its own correctness.
Walter Bagehot
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.
Walter Bagehot
Go ahead and do the impossible. It's worth the look on the faces of those who said you couldn't.
Walter Bagehot
The purse strings tie us to our kind.
Walter Bagehot
The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.
Walter Bagehot
Under a Presidential government, a nation has, except at the electing moment, no influence it has not the ballot-box before it its virtue is gone, and it must wait till its instant of despotism again returns.
Walter Bagehot
A schoolmaster should have an atmosphere of awe, and walk wonderingly, as if he was amazed at being himself.
Walter Bagehot
