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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.

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
Nature
Hasty
Human
Leap
Humans
Painful
Without
Opinion
People
Politics
Rather
Pain
Political
Undergo

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A schoolmaster should have an atmosphere of awe, and walk wonderingly, as if he was amazed at being himself.
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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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A great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.
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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.
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A princely marriage is the brilliant edition of a universal fact, and, as such, it rivets mankind.
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To a great experience one thing is essential, an experiencing nature.
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One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.
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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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But of all nations in the world the English are perhaps the least a nation of pure philosophers.
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The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.
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An inability to stay quiet is one of the conspicuous failings of mankind.
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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.
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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.
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Royalty is a government in which the attention of the nation is concentrated on one person doing interesting actions.
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Great and terrible systems of divinity and philosophy lie round about us, which, if true, might drive a wise man mad.
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I'm not the kind of writer who's able to block out the world around me. I'm mindful of our own haves and have-nots, how our culture often blames and punishes the have-nots. I worry about our precarious economic and political climate.
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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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No real English gentleman, in his secret soul, was ever sorry for the death of a political economist.
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Poverty is an anomaly to rich people it is very difficult to make out why people who want dinner do not ring the bell.
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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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