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The great pleasure of life is doing for pleasure things I do not like to do.

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
Life
Like
Pleasure
Great
Things

More quotes by Walter Bagehot

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In my youth I hoped to do great things now I shall be satisfied to get through without scandal.
Walter Bagehot
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A man's mother is his misfortune, but his wife is his fault.
Walter Bagehot
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Most men of business think Anyhow this system will probably last my time. It has gone on a long time, and is likely to go on still.
Walter Bagehot
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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.
Walter Bagehot
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The most essential mental quality for a free people, whose liberty is to be progressive, permanent and on a large scale, is much stupidity.
Walter Bagehot
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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.
Walter Bagehot
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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.
Walter Bagehot
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You may talk of the tyranny of Nero and Tiberius but the real tyranny is the tyranny of your next-door neighbor.
Walter Bagehot
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The most melancholy of human reflections, perhaps, is that, on the whole, it is a question whether the benevolence of mankind does most good or harm.
Walter Bagehot
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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.
Walter Bagehot
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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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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?
Walter Bagehot
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A princely marriage is the brilliant edition of a universal fact, and, as such, it rivets mankind.
Walter Bagehot
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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.
Walter Bagehot
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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.
Walter Bagehot
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A slight daily unconscious luxury is hardly ever wanting to the dwellers in civilization like the gentle air of a genial climate, it is a perpetual minute enjoyment.
Walter Bagehot
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The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.
Walter Bagehot
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The cure for admiring the House of Lords is to go and look at it.
Walter Bagehot
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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.
Walter Bagehot
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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