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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.

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
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May
Short
Repay
Hard
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Intelligible
Ought
Bankers
Security
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Banker

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Great and terrible systems of divinity and philosophy lie round about us, which, if true, might drive a wise man mad.
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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.
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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.
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Throughout the greater part of his life George III was a kind of 'consecrated obstruction'.
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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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A highly developed moral nature joined to an undeveloped intellectual nature, an undeveloped artistic nature, and a very limited religious nature, is of necessity repulsive. It represents a bit of human nature a good bit, of course, but a bit only in disproportionate, unnatural and revolting prominence.
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To a great experience one thing is essential, an experiencing nature.
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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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The real essence of work is concentrated energy.
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In the faculty of writing nonsense, stupidity is no match for genius.
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We see but one aspect of our neighbor, as we see but one side of the moon in either case there is also a dark half, which is unknown to us. We all come down to dinner, but each has a room to himself.
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The being without an opinion is so painful to human nature that most people will leap to a hasty opinion rather than undergo it.
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The characteristic danger of great nations, like the Romans or the English which have a long history of continuous creation, is that they may at last fail from not comprehending the great institutions which they have created
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A Parliament is nothing less than a big meeting of more or less idle people.
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The most intellectual of men are moved quite as much by the circumstances which they are used to as by their own will. The active voluntary part of a man is very small, and if it were not economized by a sleepy kind of habit, its results would be null.
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Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.
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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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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.
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An inability to stay quiet is one of the conspicuous failings of mankind.
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In my youth I hoped to do great things now I shall be satisfied to get through without scandal.
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