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The best security for people's doing their duty is that they should not know anything else to do.
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
Else
Anything
Best
People
Duty
Security
More quotes by Walter Bagehot
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.
Walter Bagehot
Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.
Walter Bagehot
Poverty is an anomaly to rich people it is very difficult to make out why people who want dinner do not ring the bell.
Walter Bagehot
A great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.
Walter Bagehot
In the faculty of writing nonsense, stupidity is no match for genius.
Walter Bagehot
Civilized ages inherit the human nature which was victorious in barbarous ages, and that nature is, in many respects, not at all suited to civilized circumstances.
Walter Bagehot
The most essential mental quality for a free people, whose liberty is to be progressive, permanent and on a large scale, is much stupidity.
Walter Bagehot
The less money lying idle the greater is the dividend.
Walter Bagehot
The being without an opinion is so painful to human nature that most people will leap to a hasty opinion rather than undergo it.
Walter Bagehot
Persecution in intellectual countries produces a superficial conformity, but also underneath an intense, incessant, implacable doubt.
Walter Bagehot
The greatest mistake is trying to be more agreeable than you can be.
Walter Bagehot
Conquest is the missionary of valor, and the hard impact of military virtues beats meanness out of the world.
Walter Bagehot
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.
Walter Bagehot
Life is not a set campaign, but an irregular work, and the main forces in it are not overt resolutions, but latent and half-involuntary promptings.
Walter Bagehot
The maxim of science is simply that of common sense-simple cases first begin with seeing how the main force acts when there is as little as possible to impede it, and when you thoroughly comprehend that, add to it in succession the separate effects of each of the incumbering and interfering agencies.
Walter Bagehot
In early times every sort of advantage tends to become a military advantage such is the best way, then, to keep it alive. But the Jewish advantage never did so beginning in religion, contrary to a thousand analogies, it remained religious.
Walter Bagehot
No man has come so near our definition of a constitutional statesman - the powers of a first-rate man and the creed of a second-rate man.
Walter Bagehot
Nothing is more unpleasant than a virtuous person with a mean mind.
Walter Bagehot
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.
Walter Bagehot
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.
Walter Bagehot
