Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
It has been said that England invented the phrase, 'Her Majesty's Opposition'.
Walter Bagehot
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Majesty
Phrase
Invented
Phrases
Opposition
England
More quotes by Walter Bagehot
The characteristic merit of the English constitutions is, that its dignified parts are very complicated and somewhat imposing, very old and rather venerable, while its efficient part, at least when in great and critical action, is decidedly simple and modern.
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
Nations touch at their summits.
Walter Bagehot
A family on the throne is an interesting idea. It brings down the pride of sovereignty to the level of petty life.
Walter Bagehot
Royalty is a government in which the attention of the nation is concentrated on one person doing interesting actions.
Walter Bagehot
All people are most credulous when they are most happy.
Walter Bagehot
Progress would not have been the rarity it is if the early food had not been the late poison.
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
No great work has ever been produced except after a long interval of still and musing meditation.
Walter Bagehot
Great and terrible systems of divinity and philosophy lie round about us, which, if true, might drive a wise man mad.
Walter Bagehot
It is often said that men are ruled by their imaginations but it would be truer to say they are governed by the weakness of their imaginations.
Walter Bagehot
Every banker knows that if he has to prove that he is worthy of credit, however good may be his arguments, in fact his credit is gone: but what we have requires no proof.
Walter Bagehot
We must not let daylight in upon the magic.
Walter Bagehot
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
The real essence of work is concentrated energy - people who really have that in a superior degree by nature are independent of the forms and habits and artifices by which less able and less active people are kept up to their labors.
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
Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.
Walter Bagehot
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
But of all nations in the world the English are perhaps the least a nation of pure philosophers.
Walter Bagehot
Public opinion is a permeating influence, and it exacts obedience to itself it requires us to drink other men's thoughts, to speak other men's words, to follow other men's habits.
Walter Bagehot
