A strongly idiosyncratic mind, violently disposed to extremes of opinion, is soon weeded out of political life, and a bodiless thinker, an ineffectual scholar, cannot even live there for a day.
Bagehot notes that extreme opinions and ineffectual thinkers are quickly eliminated from political life.
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More from Walter Bagehot
I do not think I put this too high when I say that a most important if not the most important object of early legislation was the enforcement of LUCKY rites.
He gave an excellent moral example to his contemporaries, but he is an instance of those whose good dies with them, while their evil lives after them.
One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.
If those persons be people of different temperaments, different ideas, and different educations, you have an almost infallible security that nothing, or almost nothing, will be done with excessive rapidity.
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