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But of all nations in the world the English are perhaps the least a nation of pure philosophers.

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
World
Philosophers
Philosopher
English
Nation
Pure
Perhaps
Least
Nations

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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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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.
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The purse strings tie us to our kind.
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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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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 reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.
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I'm not the kind of writer who's able to block out the world around me. I'm mindful of our own haves and have-nots, how our culture often blames and punishes the have-nots. I worry about our precarious economic and political climate.
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In the faculty of writing nonsense, stupidity is no match for genius.
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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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A constitutional statesman is in general a man of common opinions and uncommon abilities.
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A political country is like an American forest you have only to cut down the old trees, and immediately new trees come up to replace them.
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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.
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A democratic despotism is like a theocracy: it assumes its own correctness.
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Credit means that a certain confidence is given, and a certain trust reposed. Is that trust justified? And is that confidence wise? These are the cardinal questions. To put it more simply credit is a set of promises to pay will those promises be kept?
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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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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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Royalty is a government in which the attention of the nation is concentrated on one person doing interesting actions.
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Women--one half the human race at least--care fifty times more for a marriage than a ministry.
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We must not let daylight in upon the magic.
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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.
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