WALTER BAGEHOT QUOTES X

English economist and political analyst (1826-1877)

In ancient customary societies the influence of manner, which is a primary influence, has been settled into rules, so that it may aid established usages and not thwart them—that it may, above all, augment the HABIT of going by custom, and not break and weaken it. Every aid, as we have seen, was wanted to impose the yoke of custom upon such societies; and impressing the power of manner to serve them was one of the greatest aids.

WALTER BAGEHOT

Physics and Politics

Tags: custom


If France had more men of firm will, quiet composure, with a suspicion of enormous principle and a taste for moderate improvement: if a Whig party, in a word, were possible in France, France would be free.

WALTER BAGEHOT

Literary Studies

Tags: France


I do not wish very abstract, very philosophical, very hard matters to be stated in Parliament. The teaching there given must be popular, and to be popular it must be concrete, embodied, short. The problem is to know the highest truth which the people will bear, and to inculcate and preach that.

WALTER BAGEHOT

The English Constitution

Tags: teaching


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

Tags: effort


Even if we had a profound and far-seeing statesman, his deep ideas and long-reaching vision would be useless to us, unless we could impart a confidence in them to the mass of influential persons, to the unelected Commons, the unchosen Council, who assist at the deliberations of the nation.

WALTER BAGEHOT

Literary Studies

Tags: confidence


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

Tags: humorous


And though there are doubtless crises in affairs, dark and terrible moments, when a more creative intellect is needful to propose, a more dictatorial will is necessary to carry out, a sudden and daring resolution; though in times of inextricable confusion—perhaps the present is one of them—a more abstruse and disentangling intellect is required to untwist the raveled perplexities of a complicated world.

WALTER BAGEHOT

Literary Studies

Tags: the present


An Act of Parliament is at least as complex as a marriage settlement; and it is made much as a settlement would be if it were left to the vote and settled by the major part of persons concerned, including the unborn children. There is an advocate for every interest, and every interest clamours for every advantage.

WALTER BAGEHOT

The English Constitution

Tags: children


After all, the original way of writing books may turn out to be the best. The first author, it is plain, could not have taken anything from books, since there were no books for him to copy from; he looked at things for himself.

WALTER BAGEHOT

Literary Studies

Tags: books


A despot must feel that he is the pivot of the State. The stress of his kingdom is upon him. As he is, so are his affairs.

WALTER BAGEHOT

The English Constitution


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

Tags: mind


What writers are expected to write, they write; or else they do not write at all.

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

Tags: law


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

Literary Studies

Tags: habit


The facts of two things being often found together is rather a reason for, than an objection to, separating them, in idea. Sometimes they are NOT found together, and then we may be puzzled if we have not trained ourselves to separate them.

WALTER BAGEHOT

The English Constitution

Tags: facts


In the great histories there are two topics of interest—the man as a type of the age in which he lives,—the events and manners of the age he is describing; very often almost all the interest is the contrast of the two.

WALTER BAGEHOT

Literary Studies

Tags: age


Discussion, too, has incentives to progress peculiar to itself. It gives a premium to intelligence. To set out the arguments required to determine political action with such force and effect that they really should determine it, is a high and great exertion of intellect. Of course, all such arguments are produced under conditions; the argument abstractedly best is not necessarily the winning argument. Political discussion must move those who have to act; it must be framed in the ideas, and be consonant with the precedent, of its time, just as it must speak its language. But within these marked conditions good discussion is better than bad; no people can bear a government of discussion for a day, which does not, within the boundaries of its prejudices and its ideas, prefer good reasoning to bad reasoning, sound argument to unsound. A prize for argumentative mind is given in free states, to which no other states have anything to compare.

WALTER BAGEHOT

Physics and Politics

Tags: ideas


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

Tags: money


But in free nations, the votes so weighed or so counted must decide. A perfect free government is one which decides perfectly according to those votes; an imperfect, one which so decides imperfectly; a bad, one which does not so decide at all.

WALTER BAGEHOT

The English Constitution

Tags: government


A weak mind yields a passive obedience to those among whom it is thrown.

WALTER BAGEHOT

Literary Studies

Tags: mind