Quotation of the Day…

by Don Boudreaux on March 10, 2013

in Hubris and humility, Politics

… is from page 263 of Joseph Epstein’s superb 2012 collection, Essays in Biography; specifically, it’s from Epstein’s 2008 essay, in Commentary, entitled “Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.”:

Captured with present-tense fidelity, his [Schlesinger’s] Journals provide the sad portrait of the liberal New Dealer in his old age: a man … who assumes that business is inherently vile, capitalism utterly corrupt, and government essentially benevolent; whose political judgments are formed chiefly on the basis of taste (which is to say, on snobbery); and who, filled with a stirring sense of his own virtue, proclaims his concern for the people, for justice, and for enlightenment without feeling the least need to sacrifice on behalf of any of these things.

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