WALTER BAGEHOT QUOTES IV

English economist and political analyst (1826-1877)

The worst judge, they say, is a deaf judge; the most dull Government is a free Government on matters its ruling classes will not hear.

WALTER BAGEHOT

The English Constitution

Tags: government


It was good that there should be a more diffused knowledge of the material world; and it was good, therefore, that there should be partisans of matter, believers in particles, zealots for tissue, who were ready to incur any odium and any labour that a few more men might learn a few more things.

WALTER BAGEHOT

Biographical Studies

Tags: science


The work of nature in making generations is a patchwork—part resemblance, part contrast.

WALTER BAGEHOT

Physics and Politics

Tags: nature


In true metaphysics I believe that, contrary to common opinion, unbelief far oftener needs a reason and requires an effort than belief.

WALTER BAGEHOT

Physics and Politics

Tags: belief


Not only does a bureaucracy thus tend to under-government, in point of quality; it tends to over-government, in point of quantity.

WALTER BAGEHOT

The English Constitution

Tags: government


But we cannot be always seeing the ocean. Its face is always large; its smile is bright; the ever-sounding shore sounds on. Yet we have no property in them. We stop and gaze; we pause and draw our breath; we look and wonder at the grandeur of the other world; but we live on shore.

WALTER BAGEHOT

Literary Studies

Tags: ocean


The simple round of daily pleasures and genial employments which give instinctive happiness to the happiest natures, and best cheer the common life of common men, was studiously watched and scrutinized with the energy of a Puritan and the watchfulness of an inquisitor.

WALTER BAGEHOT

Literary Studies

Tags: happiness


A clear, precise, discriminating intellect shrinks at once from the symbolic, the unbounded, the indefinite. The misfortune is that mysticism is true. There certainly are kinds of truths, borne in as it were instinctively on the human intellect, most influential on the character and the heart, yet hardly capable of stringent statement, difficult to limit by an elaborate definition. Their course is shadowy; the mind seems rather to have seen than to see them, more to feel after than definitely apprehend them.

WALTER BAGEHOT

Literary Studies

Tags: character


What health is to the animal, Liberalism is to the polity. It is a principle of fermenting enjoyment, running over all the nerves, inspiring the frame, happy in its mind, easy in its place, glad to behold the sun.

WALTER BAGEHOT

Literary Studies

Tags: health


Cautious men have many adverbs, "usually," "nearly," "almost ": safe men begin, " it may be advanced " : you never know precisely what their premises are, nor what their conclusion is; they go tremulously like a timid rider; they turn hither and thither; they do not go straight across a subject, like a masterly mind.

WALTER BAGEHOT

Literary Studies

Tags: Men


In truth, it would seem that, living in the incessant din of a Calvinistic country, the best course for thoughtful and serious men was to be silent.

WALTER BAGEHOT

Literary Studies

Tags: Men


The terrible difficulty of early life—the use of pastors and masters—really is, that they compel boys to a distinct mastery of that which they do not wish to learn.

WALTER BAGEHOT

Literary Studies


It is possible to conceive a character in which but one impulse is ever felt—in which the whole being, as with a single breeze, is carried in a single direction. The only exercise of the will in such a being is in aiding and carrying out the dictates of the single propensity. And this is something.

WALTER BAGEHOT

Literary Studies

Tags: character


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


Nations touch at their summits.

WALTER BAGEHOT

The English Constitution


If happily, by its intelligence and attractiveness, a Cabinet can gain a hold upon the great middle part of Parliament, it will continue to exist notwithstanding the hatching of small plots and the machinations of mean factions.

WALTER BAGEHOT

The English Constitution

Tags: intelligence


There is, as yet, no Act of Parliament compelling a bona fide traveler to read. If you wish him to read, you must make reading pleasant. You must give him short views, and clear sentences.

WALTER BAGEHOT

Literary Studies

Tags: reading


The man of the modern world is used to speak what the modern world will hear; the writer of the modern world must write what that world will indulgently and pleasantly peruse.

WALTER BAGEHOT

Literary Studies


Sydney Smith is often compared to Swift; but this only shows with how little thought our common criticism is written. The two men have really nothing in common, except that they were both high in the Church, and both wrote amusing letters about Ireland.

WALTER BAGEHOT

Literary Studies

Tags: church


When once polities were began, there is no difficulty in explaining why they lasted. Whatever may be said against the principle of 'natural selection' in other departments, there is no doubt of its predominance in early human history. The strongest killed out the weakest, as they could. And I need not pause to prove that any form of politics more efficient than none; that an aggregate of families owning even a slippery allegiance to a single head, would be sure to have the better of a set of families acknowledging no obedience to anyone, but scattering loose about the world and fighting where they stood. Homer's Cyclops would be powerless against the feeblest band; so far from its being singular that we find no other record of that state of man, so unstable and sure to perish was it that we should rather wonder at even a single vestige lasting down to the age when for picturesqueness it became valuable in poetry.

WALTER BAGEHOT

Physics and Politics

Tags: age