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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

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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
Looks
Cure
Cures
Unfriendly
Critics
Lords
Institutions
Admiring
Lord
Critic
Though
Parliament
House
Severe
Look
Fierce

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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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So long as there are earnest believers in the world, they will always wish to punish opinions, even if their judgment tells them it is unwise and their conscience that it is wrong.
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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 cabinet is a combining committee, a hyphen which joins, a buckle which fastens, the legislative part of the state to the executive part of the state. In its origin it belongs to the one, in its functions it belongs to the other.
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An inability to stay quiet is one of the conspicuous failings of mankind.
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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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The less money lying idle the greater is the dividend.
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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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But of all nations in the world the English are perhaps the least a nation of pure philosophers.
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We must not let daylight in upon the magic.
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Nations touch at their summits.
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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.
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Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.
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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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The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards
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Whenever two people meet, there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.
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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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