Quotation of the Day…
by Don Boudreaux
on August 11, 2020
… is from page 256 of Joseph Epstein’s June 2015 essay “The Conversationalist” as this essay is reprinted (and retitled as “Michael Oakeshott”) in the 2018 collection of some of Epstein’s essays titled The Ideal of Culture:
The problem, Oakeshott felt, was not only that “politics is an uninteresting form of activity to anyone who has no desire to rule others” but that those it attracts are, too often, unimpressive human beings. At one point he calls them “scoundrels.” What isn’t required, but is too often evident, in politics is “manufacturing curable grievances.”
DBx: Or worse: manufacturing incurable grievances that people can be duped into mistakenly thinking are curable by the high’n’mighty.
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