Walter Bagehot
The Sovereign has, under a constitutional monarchy such as ours, three rights - the right to be consulted, the right to encourage, the right to warn. And a king of great sense and sagacity would want no others.Collection: Kings
Adventure is the life of commerce, but caution is the life of banking.Collection: Adventure
The great pleasure of life is doing for pleasure things I do not like to do.Collection: Life Is
Royalty is a government in which the attention of the nation is concentrated on one person doing interesting actions. A Republic is a government in which that attention is divided between many, who are all doing uninteresting actions. Accordingly, so long as the human heart is strong and the human reason weak, Royalty will be strong because it appeals to diffused feeling, and Republics weak because they appeal to the understanding.Collection: Strong
Nations touch at their summits.Collection: Summit
The mystic reverence, the religious allegiance, which are essential to a true monarchy, are imaginative sentiments that no legislature can manufacture in any people.Collection: Religious
A cabinet is a combining committee, a hyphen which joins, a buckle which fastens, the legislative part of the state to the executive part of the state. In its origin it belongs to the one, in its functions it belongs to the other.Collection: Cabinets
Capital must be propelled by self-interest; it cannot be enticed by benevolence.Collection: Self
Women--one half the human race at least--care fifty times more for a marriage than a ministry.Collection: Marriage
The purse strings tie us to our kind.Collection: Ties
War both needs and generates certain virtues; not the highest, but what may be called the preliminary virtues, as valor, veracity, the spirit of obedience, the habit of discipline. Any of these, and of others like them, when possessed by a nation, and no matter how generated, will give them a military advantage, and make them more likely to stay in the race of nations.Collection: Military
A highly developed moral nature joined to an undeveloped intellectual nature, an undeveloped artistic nature, and a very limited religious nature, is of necessity repulsive. It represents a bit of human nature a good bit, of course, but a bit only in disproportionate, unnatural and revolting prominence.Collection: Religious
Persecution in intellectual countries produces a superficial conformity, but also underneath an intense, incessant, implacable doubt.Collection: Country
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.Collection: Science
A political country is like an American forest; you have only to cut down the old trees, and immediately new trees come up to replace them.Collection: Country
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.Collection: Sleep
The Ethiop gods have Ethiop lips, Bronze cheeks, and woolly hair; The Grecian gods are like the Greeks, As keen-eyed, cold and fair.Collection: Hair
The most essential mental quality for a free people, whose liberty is to be progressive, permanent and on a large scale, is much stupidity.Collection: People
The peculiar essence of our banking system is an unprecedented trust between man and man. And when that trust is much weakened by hidden causes, a small accident may greatly hurt it, and a great accident for a moment may almost destroy it.Collection: Hurt
Efficiency in an assembly requires a solid mass of steady votes; and these are collected by a deferential attachment to particular men, or by a belief in the principles that those men represent, and they are maintained by fear of those men - by the fear that if you vote against them, you may soon yourself have no vote at all.Collection: Men
It has been said that England invented the phrase, 'Her Majesty's Opposition'.Collection: Phrases
No man has come so near our definition of a constitutional statesman - the powers of a first-rate man and the creed of a second-rate man.Collection: Men
The best security for people's doing their duty is that they should not know anything else to do.Collection: People
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.Collection: Reflection
Great and terrible systems of divinity and philosophy lie round about us, which, if true, might drive a wise man mad.Collection: Wise
Whenever two people meet, there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.Collection: Men
The maxim of science is simply that of common sense-simple cases first; begin with seeing how the main force acts when there is as little as possible to impede it, and when you thoroughly comprehend that, add to it in succession the separate effects of each of the incumbering and interfering agencies.Collection: Science
Most men of business think "Anyhow this system will probably last my time. It has gone on a long time, and is likely to go on still.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Government
It has been said that England invented the phrase, 'Her Majesty's Opposition'; that it was the first government which made a criticism of administration as much a part of the polity as administration itself. This critical opposition is the consequence of cabinet government.Collection: Government
A princely marriage is the brilliant edition of a universal fact, and, as such, it rivets mankind.Collection: Marriage
The essence of Toryism is enjoyment?but as far as communicating and establishing your creed are concernedtrya little pleasure. The way to keep up old customs is, to enjoy old customs; the way to be satisfied with the present state of things is, to enjoy that state of things.Collection: Essence
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.Collection: Religious
Throughout the greater part of his life George III was a kind of 'consecrated obstruction'.Collection: Kind
Whatever expenditure is sanctioned - even when it is sanctioned against the ministry's wish - the ministry must find the money. Accordingly, they have the strongest motive to oppose extra outlay. The ministry is (so to speak) the breadwinner of the political family, and has to meet the cost of philanthropy and glory; just as the head of a family has to pay for the charities of his wife and the toilette of his daughters.Collection: Daughter
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.Collection: Time
Royalty is a government in which the attention of the nation is concentrated on one person doing interesting actions.Collection: Government
The reason why so few good books are written is, that so few people that can write know anything. In general an author has always lived in a room, has read books, has cultivated science, is acquainted with the style and sentiments of the best authors, but he is out of the way of employing his own eyes and ears. He has nothing to hear and nothing to see. His life is a vacuum.Collection: Book
To a great experience one thing is essential, an experiencing nature.Collection: Experience
Stupidity is nature's favorite resource for preserving consistency of opinion.Collection: Stupidity
The cardinal maxim is, that any aid to a present bad Bank is the surest mode of preventing the establishment of a future good Bank.Collection: Investing
In the faculty of writing nonsense, stupidity is no match for genius.Collection: Book
The less money lying idle the greater is the dividend.Collection: Lying
The business of banking ought to be simple. If it is hard it is wrong. The only securities which a banker, using money that he may be asked at short notice to repay, ought to touch, are those which are easily saleable and easily intelligible.Collection: Simple
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.Collection: Pain
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 have a chance for it.Collection: Men
The real essence of work is concentrated energy - people who really have that in a superior degree by nature are independent of the forms and habits and artifices by which less able and less active people are kept up to their labors.Collection: Nature
What we opprobriously call stupidity, though not an enlivening quality in common society, is nature's favorite resource for preserving steadiness of conduct and consistency of opinion.Collection: Stupidity
The characteristic danger of great nations, like the Romans or the English which have a long history of continuous creation, is that they may at last fail from not comprehending the great institutions which they have createdCollection: Long