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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.

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
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Round
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Atheism
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Efficiency in an assembly requires a solid mass of steady votes and these are collected by a deferential attachment to particular men, or by a belief in the principles that those men represent, and they are maintained by fear of those men - by the fear that if you vote against them, you may soon yourself have no vote at all.
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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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So long as war is the main business of nations, temporary despotism - despotism during the campaign - is indispensable.
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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 Ethiop gods have Ethiop lips, Bronze cheeks, and woolly hair The Grecian gods are like the Greeks, As keen-eyed, cold and fair.
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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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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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What impresses men is not mind, but the result of mind.
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We must not let daylight in upon the magic.
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The real essence of work is concentrated energy.
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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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The most melancholy of human reflections, perhaps, is that, on the whole, it is a question whether the benevolence of mankind does most good or harm.
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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 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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Money is economic power.
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A constitutional statesman is in general a man of common opinions and uncommon abilities.
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Throughout the greater part of his life George III was a kind of 'consecrated obstruction'.
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The habit of common and continuous speech is a symptom of mental deficiency. It proceeds from not knowing what is going on in other people's minds.
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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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But of all nations in the world the English are perhaps the least a nation of pure philosophers.
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