Top 70 Walter Bagehot Quotes (2023 Update)

1. “The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.”

— Walter Bagehot

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2. “Go ahead and do the impossible. It’s worth the look on the faces of those who said you couldn’t.”

— Walter Bagehot

3. “Life is a compromise of what your ego wants to do, what experience tells you to do, and what your nerves let you do.”

— Walter Bagehot

4. “The real essence of work is concentrated energy.”

— Walter Bagehot

5. “No great work has ever been produced except after a long interval of still and musing meditation.”

— Walter Bagehot

6. “One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.”

— Walter Bagehot

7. “All people are most credulous when they are most happy.”

— Walter Bagehot

8. “Money is economic power.”

— Walter Bagehot

9. “The greatest mistake is trying to be more agreeable than you can be.”

— Walter Bagehot

10. “We must not let daylight in upon the magic.”

— Walter Bagehot

11. “The less money lying idle the greater is the dividend.”

— Walter Bagehot

12. “A democratic despotism is like a theocracy: it assumes its own correctness.”

— Walter Bagehot

13. “Adventure is the life of commerce, but caution is the life of banking.”

— Walter Bagehot

14. “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.”

— Walter Bagehot

15. “In the faculty of writing nonsense, stupidity is no match for genius.”

— Walter Bagehot

16. “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

17. “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.”

— Walter Bagehot

18. “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

19. “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

20. “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.”

— Walter Bagehot

21. “Stupidity is nature’s favorite resource for preserving consistency of opinion.”

— Walter Bagehot

22. “One cannot make men good by Act of Parliament.”

— Walter Bagehot

23. “Every banker knows that if he has to prove he is worthy of credit, in fact his credit is gone.”

— Walter Bagehot

24. “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.”

— Walter Bagehot

25. “The best reason why Monarchy is a strong government is, that it is an intelligible government. The mass of mankind understand it, and they hardly anywhere in the world understand any other.”

— Walter Bagehot

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26. “A princely marriage is the brilliant edition of a universal fact, and, as such, it rivets mankind.”

— Walter Bagehot

27. “The purse strings tie us to our kind.”

— Walter Bagehot

28. “The Ethiop gods have Ethiop lips, Bronze cheeks, and woolly hair; The Grecian gods are like the Greeks, As keen-eyed, cold and fair.”

— Walter Bagehot

29. “The mystic reverence, the religious allegiance, which are essential to a true monarchy, are imaginative sentiments that no legislature can manufacture in any people.”

— Walter Bagehot

30. “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.”

— Walter Bagehot

31. “A man’s mother is his misfortune, but his wife is his fault.”

— Walter Bagehot

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

— Walter Bagehot

33. “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.”

— Walter Bagehot

34. “Capital must be propelled by self-interest; it cannot be enticed by benevolence.”

— Walter Bagehot

35. “The best security for people’s doing their duty is that they should not know anything else to do.”

— Walter Bagehot

36. “So long as war is the main business of nations, temporary despotism – despotism during the campaign – is indispensable.”

— Walter Bagehot

37. “You may talk of the tyranny of Nero and Tiberius; but the real tyranny is the tyranny of your next-door neighbor.”

— Walter Bagehot

38. “The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.”

— Walter Bagehot

39. “Credit means that a certain confidence is given, and a certain trust reposed. Is that trust justified? And is that confidence wise? These are the cardinal questions. To put it more simply credit is a set of promises to pay; will those promises be kept?”

— Walter Bagehot

40. “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.”

— Walter Bagehot

41. “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.”

— Walter Bagehot

42. “In my youth I hoped to do great things; now I shall be satisfied to get through without scandal.”

— Walter Bagehot

43. “Conquest is the missionary of valor, and the hard impact of military virtues beats meanness out of the world.”

— Walter Bagehot

44. “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.”

— Walter Bagehot

45. “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.”

— Walter Bagehot

46. “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.”

— Walter Bagehot

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47. “Royalty is a government in which the attention of the nation is concentrated on one person doing interesting actions.”

— Walter Bagehot

48. “To a great experience one thing is essential, an experiencing nature.”

— Walter Bagehot

49. “Progress would not have been the rarity it is if the early food had not been the late poison.”

— Walter Bagehot

50. “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.”

— Walter Bagehot