Life & Wisdom Quote by Walter Bagehot

Bagehot flips a familiar Victorian bromide and, with one small torque of syntax, turns it into an indictment. “Ruled by their imaginations” flatters the human animal: it suggests we’re swept up by grand visions, myths, romances, ideologies. His correction is colder and more surgical. We aren’t led by the abundance of invention; we’re managed by its poverty. The engine of bad politics and bad judgment isn’t too much fantasy but too little: a cramped capacity to picture alternatives, to foresee consequences, to hold complexity without collapsing into a slogan.

The intent is polemical in the mild-mannered way Bagehot perfected: sound like you’re tidying up a phrase, then quietly pull the moral floorboards up. “Governed” matters too. It implies administration, habit, routine power. Weak imagination makes people easy to steer because they default to the nearest script - tradition, authority, the loudest story in circulation. The subtext is about susceptibility: propaganda works best on minds that can’t simulate how they’re being played, or imagine that the world could be otherwise.

Contextually, Bagehot is writing in an era intoxicated by progress and anxious about mass democracy, an age of newspapers, parties, and public opinion hardening into “common sense.” His line anticipates a modern media ecology where the scarcity is not information but imaginative range. It lands now because it reframes a comforting diagnosis (we’re too dreamy) into a harsher one: our failures come from anemic inner lives, not excessive ones, and power thrives on that deficiency.