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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
Anything
Best
People
Duty
Security
Else

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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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The less money lying idle the greater is the dividend.
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A great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.
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Not only does a bureaucracy tend to under-government in point of quality it tends to over-government in point of quantity.
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Persecution in intellectual countries produces a superficial conformity, but also underneath an intense, incessant, implacable doubt.
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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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The essence of Toryism is enjoyment?but as far as communicating and establishing your creed are concernedtrya little pleasure. The way to keep up old customs is, to enjoy old customs the way to be satisfied with the present state of things is, to enjoy that state of things.
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What impresses men is not mind, but the result of mind.
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A constitutional statesman is in general a man of common opinions and uncommon abilities.
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It has been said that England invented the phrase, 'Her Majesty's Opposition' that it was the first government which made a criticism of administration as much a part of the polity as administration itself. This critical opposition is the consequence of cabinet government.
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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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Stupidity is nature's favorite resource for preserving consistency of opinion.
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A democratic despotism is like a theocracy: it assumes its own correctness.
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The great pleasure of life is doing for pleasure things I do not like to do.
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Progress would not have been the rarity it is if the early food had not been the late poison.
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The real essence of work is concentrated energy.
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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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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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One cannot make men good by Act of Parliament.
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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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