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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

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Walter Bagehot
Age: 51 †
Born: 1826
Born: February 3
Died: 1877
Died: March 24
Businessperson
Economist
Engineer
Journalist
Political Scientist
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Sociologist
Langport
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More quotes by Walter Bagehot

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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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An element of exaggeration clings to the popular judgment: great vices are made greater, great virtues greater also interesting incidents are made more interesting, softer legends more soft.
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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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Progress would not have been the rarity it is if the early food had not been the late poison.
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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.
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Adventure is the life of commerce, but caution is the life of banking.
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No real English gentleman, in his secret soul, was ever sorry for the death of a political economist.
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Poverty is an anomaly to rich people it is very difficult to make out why people who want dinner do not ring the bell.
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The real essence of work is concentrated energy.
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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.
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No great work has ever been produced except after a long interval of still and musing meditation.
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A severe though not unfriendly critic of our institutions said that the cure for admiring the House of Lords was to go and look at it.
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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.
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An ambassador is not simply an agent he is also a spectacle.
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Capital must be propelled by self-interest it cannot be enticed by benevolence.
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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.
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It has been said that England invented the phrase, 'Her Majesty's Opposition'.
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Men who do not make advances to women are apt to become victims to women who make advances to them.
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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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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.
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