Walter Bagehot
Walter Bagehot
Walter Bagehotwas a British journalist, businessman, and essayist, who wrote extensively about government, economics, and literature...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth3 February 1826
ties purses kind
The purse strings tie us to our kind.
life half campaigns
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.
money economic economic-power
Money is economic power.
people
All people are most credulous when they are most happy.
religious military analogies
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.
pain hate men
One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea. It...makes you think that after all, your favorite notions may be wrong, your firmest beliefs ill-founded....Naturally, therefore, common men hate a new idea, and are disposed more or less to ill-treat the original man who brings it.
art thinking government
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.
thinking ice different
We think of Euclid as of fine ice; we admire Newton as we admire the peak of Teneriffe. Even the intensest labors, the most remote triumphs of the abstract intellect, seem to carry us into a region different from our own-to be in a terra incognita of pure reasoning, to cast a chill on human glory.
experience essentials great-experiences
To a great experience one thing is essential, an experiencing nature.
house looks fierce
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.
reflection doe melancholy
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.
marriage facts brilliant
A princely marriage is the brilliant edition of a universal fact, and, as such, it rivets mankind.
government quality doe
Not only does a bureaucracy tend to under-government in point of quality; it tends to over-government in point of quantity.
life-is pleasure pleasures-of-life
The great pleasure of life is doing for pleasure things I do not like to do.