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Authors & Writing
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Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.
-Walter Bagehot
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Belief
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Strong beliefs win strong men, and then make them stronger.
-Walter Bagehot
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Bureaucracy
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A bureaucracy is sure to think that its duty is to augment official power, official business, or official members, rather than to leave free the energies of mankind; it overdoes the quantity of government, as well as impairs its quality. The truth is, that a skilled bureaucracy is, though it boasts of an appearance of science, quite inconsistent with the true principles of the art of business.
-Walter Bagehot
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Conversation
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The habit of common and continuous speech is a symptom of mental deficiency. It proceeds from not knowing what is going on in other people's minds.
-Walter Bagehot
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Diplomacy
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An ambassador is not simply an agent; he is also a spectacle.
-Walter Bagehot
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Exaggeration
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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.
-Walter Bagehot
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Freedom
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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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Government
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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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Ideology
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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 gave a chance for it.
-Walter Bagehot
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Innovation
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One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.
-Walter Bagehot
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Law
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Our law very often reminds one of those outskirts of cities where you cannot for a long time tell how the streets come to wind about in so capricious and serpent-like a manner. At last it strikes you that they grew up, house by house, on the devious tracks of the old green lanes; and if you follow on to the existing fields, you may often find the change half complete.
-Walter Bagehot
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Magic
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We must not let daylight in upon the magic.
-Walter Bagehot
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Marriage
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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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Men & Women
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Men who do not make advances to women are apt to become victims to women who make advances to them.
-Walter Bagehot
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Mind, the
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What impresses men is not mind, but the result of mind.
-Walter Bagehot
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Nation, Nationality, Nationalism
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In every particular state of the world, those nations which are strongest tend to prevail over the others; and in certain marked peculiarities the strongest tend to be the best.
-Walter Bagehot
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Observation
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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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Opinion
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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
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Parliament
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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.
-Walter Bagehot
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Pleasure
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A great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.
-Walter Bagehot
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Politics
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When great questions end, little parties begin.
-Walter Bagehot
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The apparent rulers of the English nation are like the imposing personages of a splendid procession: it is by them the mob are influenced; it is they whom the spectators cheer. The real rulers are secreted in second-rate carriages; no one cares for them or asks after them, but they are obeyed implicitly and unconsciously by reason of the splendor of those who eclipsed and preceded them.
-Walter Bagehot
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A constitutional statesman is in general a man of common opinions and uncommon abilities.
-Walter Bagehot
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Poverty
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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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Presidency
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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
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Books by and about Walter Bagehot