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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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Conquest is the missionary of valor, and the hard impact of military virtues beats meanness out of the world.
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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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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 cardinal maxim is, that any aid to a present bad Bank is the surest mode of preventing the establishment of a future good Bank.
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Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.
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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 caucus is a sort of representative meeting which sits voting and voting till they have cut out all the known men against whom much is to be said, and agreed on some unknown man against whom there is nothing known, and therefore nothing to be alleged.
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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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Throughout the greater part of his life George III was a kind of 'consecrated obstruction'.
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A Parliament is nothing less than a big meeting of more or less idle people.
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An element of exaggeration clings to the popular judgment: great vices are made greater, great virtues greater also interesting incidents are made more interesting, softer legends more soft.
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It has been said that England invented the phrase, 'Her Majesty's Opposition'.
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Go ahead and do the impossible. It's worth the look on the faces of those who said you couldn't.
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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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The business of banking ought to be simple. If it is hard it is wrong. The only securities which a banker, using money that he may be asked at short notice to repay, ought to touch, are those which are easily saleable and easily intelligible.
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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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The great pleasure of life is doing for pleasure things I do not like to do.
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Life is a compromise of what your ego wants to do, what experience tells you to do, and what your nerves let you do.
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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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No real English gentleman, in his secret soul, was ever sorry for the death of a political economist.
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