Walter Bagehot: Man

Walter Bagehot was British journalist, businessman, and essayist. Explore interesting quotes on man.

Walter Bagehot: 84 quotes 2 likes

“The caucus is a sort of representative meeting which sits voting and voting till they have cut out all the known men against whom much is to be said, and agreed on some unknown man against whom there is nothing known, and therefore nothing to be alleged.”

Walter Bagehot book The English Constitution

No. V, The House of Commons, p. 155
Bagehot was commenting on the method of selecting Presidential candidates in the United States.
The English Constitution (1867)

Men

“All the inducements of early society tend to foster immediate action; all its penalties fall on the man who pauses; the traditional wisdom of those times was never weary of inculcating that "delays are dangerous," and that the sluggish man — the man "who roasteth not that which he took in hunting" — will not prosper on the earth, and indeed will very soon perish out of it. And in consequence an inability to stay quiet, an irritable desire to act directly, is one of the most conspicuous failings of mankind.”

Walter Bagehot

Source: Physics and Politics https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4350 (1869), Ch. 5

Wisdom , Penalty , Time

“A constitutional statesman is in general a man of common opinions and uncommon abilities.”

Walter Bagehot

Sir Robert Peel
Biographical Studies (1907)

“The greatest enjoyment possible to man was that which this philosophy promises its votaries—the pleasure of being always right, and always reasoning—without ever being bound to look at anything.”

Walter Bagehot book The English Constitution

No. VII, Its Supposed Checks and Balances, p. 250
From SHAKESPEARE: THE INDIVIDUAL, quote attributed to Bagehot says: "The greatest pleasure in life is doing what other people say you cannot do."
The English Constitution (1867)

Pleasure

“Behind every man's external life, which he leads in company, there is another which he leads alone, and which he carries with him apart. We see but one aspect of our neighbor, as we see but one side of the moon; in either case there is also a dark half, which is unknown to us.”

Walter Bagehot

[Morgan, Forrest, Shakespeare—the Man, The works of Walter Bagehot, vol. 1, 1891, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101064786716;view=1up;seq=388, 280 of 255–302]
Shakespeare—the Man (1853)

Life