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The greatest mistake is trying to be more agreeable than you can be.
Walter Bagehot
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Walter Bagehot
Age: 51 †
Born: 1826
Born: February 3
Died: 1877
Died: March 24
Businessperson
Economist
Engineer
Journalist
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Politician
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Langport
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Agreeable
Greatest
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Trying
More quotes by Walter Bagehot
We think of Euclid as of fine ice we admire Newton as we admire the peak of Teneriffe. Even the intensest labors, the most remote triumphs of the abstract intellect, seem to carry us into a region different from our own-to be in a terra incognita of pure reasoning, to cast a chill on human glory.
Walter Bagehot
Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.
Walter Bagehot
Life is a school of probability.
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
The characteristic merit of the English constitutions is, that its dignified parts are very complicated and somewhat imposing, very old and rather venerable, while its efficient part, at least when in great and critical action, is decidedly simple and modern.
Walter Bagehot
Royalty is a government in which the attention of the nation is concentrated on one person doing interesting actions.
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
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.
Walter Bagehot
Life is not a set campaign, but an irregular work, and the main forces in it are not overt resolutions, but latent and half-involuntary promptings.
Walter Bagehot
The being without an opinion is so painful to human nature that most people will leap to a hasty opinion rather than undergo it.
Walter Bagehot
A Parliament is nothing less than a big meeting of more or less idle people.
Walter Bagehot
If you have to prove you are worthy of credit, your credit is already gone.
Walter Bagehot
Women--one half the human race at least--care fifty times more for a marriage than a ministry.
Walter Bagehot
It is good to be without vices, but it is not good to be without temptations.
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
The characteristic danger of great nations, like the Romans or the English which have a long history of continuous creation, is that they may at last fail from not comprehending the great institutions which they have created
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
Nothing is more unpleasant than a virtuous person with a mean mind.
Walter Bagehot
So long as war is the main business of nations, temporary despotism - despotism during the campaign - is indispensable.
Walter Bagehot
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.
Walter Bagehot
