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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.

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
Real
Tyrants
Tyranny
Neighbor
Door
Doors
Talk
Next
May
Nero

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No great work has ever been produced except after a long interval of still and musing meditation.
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A family on the throne is an interesting idea. It brings down the pride of sovereignty to the level of petty life.
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The less money lying idle the greater is the dividend.
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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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The most intellectual of men are moved quite as much by the circumstances which they are used to as by their own will. The active voluntary part of a man is very small, and if it were not economized by a sleepy kind of habit, its results would be null.
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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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Nations touch at their summits.
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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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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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In my youth I hoped to do great things now I shall be satisfied to get through without scandal.
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The peculiar essence of our banking system is an unprecedented trust between man and man. And when that trust is much weakened by hidden causes, a small accident may greatly hurt it, and a great accident for a moment may almost destroy it.
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History is strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manliness, and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as soon as the movements of the world have a chance for it.
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The best security for people's doing their duty is that they should not know anything else to do.
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The great pleasure of life is doing for pleasure things I do not like to do.
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When great questions end, little parties begin.
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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.
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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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It is good to be without vices, but it is not good to be without temptations.
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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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Persecution in intellectual countries produces a superficial conformity, but also underneath an intense, incessant, implacable doubt.
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