The great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.
Source: Walter Bagehot biography and literary studies
Author
English · 1826-1877 · 11 quotes
English · 1826–1877
11 quotes in our collection
Walter Bagehot was the English journalist and economist whose two books — The English Constitution (1867) and Lombard Street (1873) — remain the most lucid accounts of how British parliamentary democracy and the London money market actually work, as distinct from how their practitioners claim they work. Born in Langport, Somerset in 1826, he trained as a lawyer, worked in his family's banking business, and edited The Economist from 1861 until his death in 1877 at fifty-one. He had the gift of the journalist who knows that the most interesting thing about institutions is the gap between their official self-description and their actual operation. The English Constitution introduced the distinction between the dignified and the efficient parts of government — a distinction that political scientists have been using ever since. So few people who can write know anything: a remark that has not dated.
Common Themes
Collected Quotes
The great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.
The most galling of yokes is the tyranny of your next-door neighbor.
So few people who can write know anything.
Business is really pleasanter than pleasure, though it does not look so.
The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people that can write know anything.
The dignified parts of Government are those which bring it force - which attract its motive power.
The efficient parts only employ that power.
The efficient secret of the English constitution is the nearly complete fusion of the executive and legislative powers.
The Cabinet is an absolutely secret committee, which can dissolve the assembly which appointed it.