The English Constitution Quotes

“Custom is the first check on tyranny; that fixed routine of social life at which modern innovations chafe, and by which modern improvement is impeded, is the primitive check on base power.”
― Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution

“The splitting of sovereignty into many parts amounts to there being no sovereign.”
― Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution

“[A]n ancient and ever-altering constitution is like an old man who still wears with attached fondness clothes in the fashion of his youth: what you see of him is the same; what you do not see is wholly altered.”
― Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution

“The most hopeless idleness is that most smoothed with excellent plans.”
― Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution

“The efficient secret of the English Constitution may be described as the close union, the nearly complete fusion of the executive and legislative powers. According to the traditional theory, as it exists in all the books, the goodness of our constitution consists in the entire separation of the legislative and executive authorities, but in truth its merit consists in their singular approximation. The connecting link is the cabinet.”
― Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution

“A people never hears censure of itself.”
― Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution

“The English constitution, in a word, is framed on the principle of choosing a single sovereign authority, and making it good: the American, upon the principle of having many sovereign authorities, and hoping that their multitude may atone for their inferiority.”
― Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution

“[U]nder a presidential government a nation has, except at the electing moment, no influence; it has not the ballot-box before it; its virtue is gone, and it must wait till its instant of despotism again returns.”
― Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution