The business of banking ought to be simple. If it is hard it is wrong. The only securities which a banker, using money that he may be asked at short notice to repay, ought to touch, are those which are easily saleable and easily intelligible.
Walter BagehotThe being without an opinion is so painful to human nature that most people will leap to a hasty opinion rather than undergo it.
Walter BagehotRoyalty is a government in which the attention of the nation is concentrated on one person doing interesting actions.
Walter BagehotThere seems to be an unalterable contradiction between the human mind and its employments. How can a soul be a merchant? What relation to an immortal being have the price of linseed, the brokerage on hemp? Can an undying creature debit petty expenses and charge for carriage paid? The soul ties its shoes; the mind washes its hands in a basin. All is incongruous.
Walter Bagehot