Thomas Carlyle
418 citations

Men are to be guided only by their self-interests. Good government is a good balancing of these; and, except a keen eye and appetite for self-interest, requires no virtue in any quarter. To both parties it is emphatically a machine: to the discontented, a taxing-machine; to the contented, a machine for securing property. Its duties and its faults are not those of a father, but of an active parish-constable. ✨ Thomas Carlyle, A.H.R. Ball (2014). Selections from Carlyle, p.111, Cambridge University Press

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Politics

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