Walter Bagehot

Nothing, perhaps, would more surprise the English people than if the Queen by a coup d’état and on a sudden destroyed a ministry firm in the allegiance and secure of a majority in Parliament. That power, indisputably, in theory, belongs to …

The ultimate authority in the English Constitution is a newly-elected House of Commons.

It appears to me that the functions of our executive in dissolving the Commons and augmenting the Peers are among the most important, and the least appreciated, parts of our whole government, and that hundreds of errors have been made in …

According to our system the Chancellor of the Exchequer is the enemy of the Exchequer; a whole series of enactments try to protect it from him.

France elects its ruler in the streets of Paris.

The trained official hates the rude, untrained public.

In many matters of business, perhaps in most, a continuity of mediocrity is better than a hotch-potch of excellences.

The great maxim of modern thought is not only the toleration of everything, but the examination of everything. It is by examining very bare, very dull, very unpromising things, that modern science has come to be what it is.

The greatest teacher of all in Parliament, the head-master of the nation, the great elevator of the country—so far as Parliament elevates it—must be the Prime Minister.

If happily, by its intelligence and attractiveness, a cabinet can gain a hold upon the great middle part of Parliament, it will continue to exist notwithstanding the hatching of small plots and the machinations of mean factions.

Free government is self-government. A government of the people by the people. The best government of this sort is that which the people think best.

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 …

Nobody will understand parliamentary government who fancies it an easy thing, a natural thing, a thing not needing explanation.

A great assembly is as soon spoiled by over-indulgence as a little child.

A good horse likes to feel the rider’s bit; and a great deliberative assembly likes to feel that it is under worthy guidance.

An assembly in which the mass of the members have nothing to lose, where most have nothing to gain, where every one has a social position firmly fixed, where no one has a constituency, where hardly any one cares for the minister of the …

It always perhaps happens in a great nation, that certain bodies of sensible men posted prominently in its constitution, acquire functions, and usefully exercise functions, which at the outset, no one expected from them, and which do not …

Nations touch at their summits.

[A]dministration is an art as painting is an art; and ... no book can teach the practice of either.

The best test of a machine is the work it turns out. Let any one who knows what legal documents ought to be, read first a will he has just been making and then an Act of Parliament; he will certainly say, “I would have dismissed my …

An Act of Parliament is at least as complex as a marriage settlement; and it is made much as a settlement would be if it were left to the vote and settled by the major part of persons concerned, including the unborn children.

[W]hatever is unnecessary in government is pernicious.

[T]he two most singular prerogatives of an English king [are] the power of creating new peers and the power of dissolving the Commons.

To wish to be a despot ... marks in our day an uncultivated mind.