Quote

The best security for people's doing their duty is that they should not know anything else to do.

Walter Bagehot

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Walter Bagehot
Age: 51 †
Born: 1826
Born: February 3
Died: 1877
Died: March 24
Businessperson
Economist
Engineer
Journalist
Political Scientist
Politician
Sociologist
Langport
Somerset
Duty
Security
Else
Anything
Best
People

More quotes by Walter Bagehot

Image
Nine tenths of modern science is in this respect the same: it is the produce of men whom their contemporaries thought dreamers - who were laughed at for caring for what did not concern them - who, as the proverb went, 'walked into a well from looking at the stars' - who were believed to be useless, if anyone could be such.
Walter Bagehot
Image
Great and terrible systems of divinity and philosophy lie round about us, which, if true, might drive a wise man mad.
Walter Bagehot
Image
We must not let daylight in upon the magic.
Walter Bagehot
Image
Money is economic power.
Walter Bagehot
Image
A family on the throne is an interesting idea. It brings down the pride of sovereignty to the level of petty life.
Walter Bagehot
Image
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.
Walter Bagehot
Image
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
Image
Nations touch at their summits.
Walter Bagehot
Image
A schoolmaster should have an atmosphere of awe, and walk wonderingly, as if he was amazed at being himself.
Walter Bagehot
Image
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.
Walter Bagehot
Image
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.
Walter Bagehot
Image
A princely marriage is the brilliant edition of a universal fact, and, as such, it rivets mankind.
Walter Bagehot
Image
Not only does a bureaucracy tend to under-government in point of quality it tends to over-government in point of quantity.
Walter Bagehot
Image
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
Image
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.
Walter Bagehot
Image
What we opprobriously call stupidity, though not an enlivening quality in common society, is nature's favorite resource for preserving steadiness of conduct and consistency of opinion.
Walter Bagehot
Image
The purse strings tie us to our kind.
Walter Bagehot
Image
The cardinal maxim is, that any aid to a present bad Bank is the surest mode of preventing the establishment of a future good Bank.
Walter Bagehot
Image
The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.
Walter Bagehot
Image
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