Walter Bagehot

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

Public opinion... requires us to think other men's thoughts, to speak other men's words, to follow other men's habits.

Business is really more agreeable than pleasure: it interests the whole mind . . . but it does not look as if it did.

An inability to stay quiet is one of the conspicuous failings of mankind.

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

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

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.

Life is a school of probability.

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

It has been said that England invented the phrase, 'Her Majesty's Opposition'; that it was the first government which made a criticism of administration as much a part of the polity as administration itself. This critical opposition is the consequence of cabinet government.