WALTER BAGEHOT QUOTES V

English economist and political analyst (1826-1877)

Now that the suffrage is universal, the average intellect and the average culture of the constituent bodies are excessively low; and even such mind and culture as there is has long been enslaved to authority.

WALTER BAGEHOT

The English Constitution

Tags: culture


An ordinary idle king on a constitutional throne will leave no mark on his time: he will do little good and as little harm.

WALTER BAGEHOT

The English Constitution


A man who is always rushing into the street will become familiar with the street. One who is forever changing from subject to subject will not become painfully acquainted with any one, but he will know the outsides of them all, and the road from each to the other.

WALTER BAGEHOT

Biographical Studies


A weak mind yields a passive obedience to those among whom it is thrown.

WALTER BAGEHOT

Literary Studies

Tags: mind


What writers are expected to write, they write; or else they do not write at all.

WALTER BAGEHOT

Physics and Politics


What is most evident is not the difficulty of getting a fixed law, but getting out of a fixed law; not of cementing ... a cake of custom, but of breaking the cake of custom; not of making the first preservative habit, but of breaking through it, and reaching something better.

WALTER BAGEHOT

Physics and Politics

Tags: custom


the academies are asylums of the ideas and the tastes of the last age.

WALTER BAGEHOT

Physics and Politics

Tags: age


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.

WALTER BAGEHOT

Physics and Politics

Tags: art


Experience shows how incredibly difficult it is to get men really to encourage the principle of originality. They will admit it in theory, but in practice the old error—the error which arrested a hundred civilizations—returns again. Men are too fond of their own life, too credulous of the completeness of their own ideas, too angry at the pain of new thoughts, to be able to bear easily with a changing existence; or else, having new ideas, they want to enforce them on mankind—to make them heard, and admitted, and obeyed before, in simple competition with other ideas, they would ever be so naturally.

WALTER BAGEHOT

Physics and Politics

Tags: ideas


Strong as the propensity to imitation is among civilized men, we must conceive it as an impulse of which their minds have been partially denuded. Like the far-seeing sight, the infallible hearing, the magical scent of the savage, it is a half-lost power. It was strongest in ancient times, and IS strongest in uncivilized regions.

WALTER BAGEHOT

Physics and Politics

Tags: Men


Before history began there must have been in the nation which writes it much progress; else there could have been no history. It is a great advance in civilisation to be able to describe the common facts of life, and perhaps, if we were to examine it, we should find that it was at least an equal advance to wish to describe them.

WALTER BAGEHOT

Physics and Politics

Tags: history


The power of a government by discussion as an instrument of elevation plainly depends—other things being equal—on the greatness or littleness of the things to be discussed.

WALTER BAGEHOT

Physics and Politics

Tags: government


Indeed, the dangers arising from a party spirit in Parliament exceeding that of the nation, and of a selfishness in Parliament contradicting the true interest of the nation, are not great dangers in a country where the mind of the nation is steadily political, and where its control over its representatives is constant. A steady opposition to a formed public opinion is hardly possible in our House of Commons, so incessant is the national attention to politics, and so keen the fear in the mind of each member that he may lose his valued seat. These dangers belong to early and scattered communities, where there are no interesting political questions, where the distances are great, where no vigilant opinion passes judgment on Parliamentary excesses, where few care to have seats in the chamber, and where many of those few are from their characters and their antecedents better not there than there. The one great vice of Parliamentary government in an adult political nation, is the caprice of Parliament in the choice of a Ministry. A nation can hardly control it here; and it is not good that, except within wide limits, it should control it. The Parliamentary judgment of the merits or demerits of an administration very generally depends on matters which the Parliament, being close at hand, distinctly sees, and which the distant nation does not see. But where personality enters, capriciousness begins. It is easy to imagine a House of Commons which is discontented with all statesmen, which is contented with none, which is made up of little parties, which votes in small knots, which will adhere steadily to no leader, which gives every leader a chance and a hope. Such Parliaments require the imminent check of possible dissolution; but that check is (as has been shown) better in the Premier than in the sovereign; and by the late practice of our constitution, its use is yearly ebbing from the sovereign, and yearly centering in the Premier. The Queen can hardly now refuse a defeated Minister the chance of a dissolution, any more than she can dissolve in the time of an undefeated one, and without his consent.

WALTER BAGEHOT

The English Constitution

Tags: chance


Commerce is like war; its result is patent. Do you make money or do you not make it? There is as little appeal from figures as from battle.

WALTER BAGEHOT

The English Constitution

Tags: money


Of all modes of enforcing moderation on a party, the best is to contrive that the members of that party shall be intrinsically moderate, careful, and almost shrinking men; and the next best to contrive that the leaders of the party, who have protested most in its behalf, shall be placed in the closest contact with the actual world.

WALTER BAGEHOT

The English Constitution


Great and terrible systems of divinity and philosophy lie round about us, which, if true, might drive a wise man mad.

WALTER BAGEHOT

Literary Studies

Tags: philosophy


The English have discovered pacific war. We may not be able to kill people as well as the French, or fit out and feed distant armaments as neatly as they do; but we are unrivalled at a quiet armament here at home which never kills anybody, and never wants to be sent anywhere.

WALTER BAGEHOT

Literary Studies

Tags: home


There are no straight lines in Nature or Shakespeare.

WALTER BAGEHOT

Literary Studies

Tags: nature


Since war has ceased to be the moving force in the world, men have become more tender one to another, and shrink from what they used to inflict without caring; and this is not so much because men are improved (which may or may not be in various cases), but because they have no longer the daily habit of war--have no longer formed their notions upon war, and therefore are guided by thoughts and feelings which soldiers as such--soldiers educated simply by their trade--are too hard to understand.

WALTER BAGEHOT

Physics and Politics

Tags: war


But what are nations? What are these groups which are so familiar to us, and yet if we stop to think, so strange; which are as old as history ... what breaks the human race up into fragments so unlike one another, and yet each in its interior so monotonous?

WALTER BAGEHOT

Physics and Politics