English economist and political analyst (1826-1877)
Man, being the strongest of all animals, differs from the rest; he was obliged to be his own domesticator; he had to tame himself.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Physics and Politics
On few subjects has more nonsense been written than on the learning of Shakespeare.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Literary Studies
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
There was a great deal of excellent hammering hammered in the parish, and it was sinful that a man with nothing to do should sit tranquil.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Literary Studies
To make a single nation illustrate a principle, you must exaggerate much and you must omit much.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Physics and Politics
Wit is part of the machinery of the intellect.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Literary Studies
"Maternity," it has been said, "is a matter of fact, paternity is a matter of opinion."
WALTER BAGEHOT
Physics and Politics
In the most intellectual city of the ancient world, in its most intellectual age, Socrates, its most intellectual inhabitant, discouraged the study of physics because they engendered uncertainty, and did not augment human happiness. The kind of knowledge which is most connected with human progress now was that least connected with it then.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Physics and Politics
It is true that a completely new House of Lords, mainly composed of men of ability, selected because they were able, might very likely attempt to make ability the predominant power in the State, and to rival, if not conquer, the House of Commons, where the standard of intelligence is not much above the common English average. But in the present English world such a House of Lords would soon lose all influence. People would say, "it was too clever by half," and in an Englishman's mouth that means a very severe censure. The English people would think it grossly anomalous if their elected assembly of rich men were thwarted by a nominated assembly of talkers and writers. Sensible men of substantial means are what we wish to be ruled by, and a peerage of genius would not compare with it in power.
WALTER BAGEHOT
The English Constitution
The ages of isolation had their use, for they trained men for ages when they were not to be isolated.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Physics and Politics
The English people must miss a thousand minutiae that continental bureaucracies know even too well; but if they see a cardinal truth which those bureaucracies miss, that cardinal truth may greatly help the world.
WALTER BAGEHOT
The English Constitution
The quaking bystanders in a superstitious age would soon have slain an isolated bold man in the beginning of his innovations.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Physics and Politics
The supreme court of the English people ought to be a great conspicuous tribunal, ought to rule all other courts, ought to have no competitor, ought to bring our law into unity, ought not to be hidden beneath the robes of a legislative assembly.
WALTER BAGEHOT
The English Constitution
We live among the marvels of science, but we know how little they change us. The essentials of life are what they were. We go by the train, but we are not improved at our journey's end. We have railways, and canals, and manufactures--excellent things, no doubt, but they do not touch the soul. Somehow, they seem to make life more superficial.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Biographical Studies
It might be advanced that there are original sources of expression in the essential grandeur and sublimity of Nature, of an analogous though fainter kind, to those familiar, inexplicable signs by which we trace in the very face and outward lineaments of man the existence and working of the mind within.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Literary Studies
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
But much argument is not required to guide the public, still less a formal exposition of that argument. What is mostly needed is the manly utterance of clear conclusions; if a statesman gives these in a felicitous way (and if with a few light and humorous illustrations, so much the better), he has done his part.
WALTER BAGEHOT
The English Constitution
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; which Herodotus found in almost as great numbers and with quite as marked distinctions as we see them now? What breaks the human race up into fragments so unlike one another, and yet each in its interior so monotonous? The question is most puzzling, though the fact is so familiar, and I would not venture to say that I can answer it completely, though I can advance some considerations which, as it seems to me, go a certain way towards answering it. Perhaps these same considerations throw some light, too, on the further and still more interesting question why some few nations progress, and why the greater part do not.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Physics and Politics
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
Everybody who has studied mathematics knows how many shadowy difficulties he seemed to have before he understood the problem, and how impossible it was when once the demonstration had flashed upon him, ever to comprehend those indistinct difficulties again, or to call up the mental confusion, that admitted them. So in these days, when we cannot by any effort drive out of our minds the notion of law, we cannot imagine the mind of one who had never known it, and who could not by any effort have conceived it.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Physics and Politics