Quote

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.

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
Politics
Represent
Deferential
Belief
Steady
Collected
Fear
Requires
Maintained
Political
Vote
Votes
May
Soon
Assembly
Men
Mass
Efficiency
Principles
Attachment
Particular
Solid

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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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Conquest is the missionary of valor, and the hard impact of military virtues beats meanness out of the world.
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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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An inability to stay quiet is one of the conspicuous failings of mankind.
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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.
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But of all nations in the world the English are perhaps the least a nation of pure philosophers.
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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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The greatest mistake is trying to be more agreeable than you can be.
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Nations touch at their summits.
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The best reason why Monarchy is a strong government is, that it is an intelligible government. The mass of mankind understand it, and they hardly anywhere in the world understand any other.
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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.
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Capital must be propelled by self-interest it cannot be enticed by benevolence.
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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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The great pleasure of life is doing for pleasure things I do not like to do.
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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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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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The being without an opinion is so painful to human nature that most people will leap to a hasty opinion rather than undergo it.
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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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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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Progress would not have been the rarity it is if the early food had not been the late poison.
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