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

- Walter Bagehot

So long as there are earnest believers in the world, they will always wish to punish opinions, even if their judgment tells them it is unwise and their conscience that it is wrong.

- Walter Bagehot

We must not let daylight in upon the magic.

- Walter Bagehot

The reason that there are so few good books written is that so few people who write know anything.

- Walter Bagehot

What impresses men is not mind, but the result of mind.

- Walter Bagehot

Woman absent is woman dead.

- Walter Bagehot

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

- Walter Bagehot

In every particular state of the world, those nations which are strongest tend to prevail over the others; and in certain marked peculiarities the strongest tend to be the best.

- Walter Bagehot

So long as war is the main business of nations, temporary despotism - despotism during the campaign - is indispensable.

- Walter Bagehot

The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards.

- Walter Bagehot

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

- Walter Bagehot

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

The cure for admiring the House of Lords is to go and look at it.

- Walter Bagehot

The being without an opinion is so painful to human nature that most people will leap to a hasty opinion rather than undergo it.

- Walter Bagehot

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

- Walter Bagehot

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

- Walter Bagehot

Nothing is more unpleasant than a virtuous person with a mean mind.

- Walter Bagehot

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

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

- Walter Bagehot

A schoolmaster should have an atmosphere of awe, and walk wonderingly, as if he was amazed at being himself.

- Walter Bagehot