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The characteristic danger of great nations, like the Romans or the English which have a long history of continuous creation, is that they may at last fail from not comprehending the great institutions which they have created

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
History
Institutions
May
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Comprehending
Great
Failing
Romans
Long
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Characteristic
Like
Creation
Continuous
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Fail
Last
English

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The cure for admiring the House of Lords is to go and look at it.
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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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Adventure is the life of commerce, but caution is the life of banking.
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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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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 princely marriage is the brilliant edition of a universal fact, and, as such, it rivets mankind.
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A democratic despotism is like a theocracy: it assumes its own correctness.
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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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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.
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Life is a school of probability.
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Dullness in matters of government is a good sign, and not a bad one - in particular, dullness in parliamentary government is a test of its excellence, an indication of its success.
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Business is really more agreeable than pleasure it interests the whole mind, the aggregate nature of man more continuously, and more deeply. But it does not look as if it did.
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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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It is good to be without vices, but it is not good to be without temptations.
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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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In my youth I hoped to do great things now I shall be satisfied to get through without scandal.
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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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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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An influential member of parliament has not only to pay much money to become such, and to give time and labour, he has also to sacrifice his mind too - at least all the characteristics part of it that which is original and most his own.
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