Friday, January 04, 2008

Quote of the day

It is a deformity in some 'radicals' to imagine that, once they have found the lowest or meanest motive for an action or for a person, they have correctly identified the authentic or 'real' one. Many a purge or show trial has got merrily under way in this manner
Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Paine's "Rights of Man": A Biography - A Book That Shook the World (Books That Shook the World), page 71.

And the context is worth citing too. Karl Marx, in a footnote to Das Kapital, volume 1, wrote of Burke:
The sycophant - who in the pay of the English oligarchy played the romantic laudator temporis acti against the French revolution just as, in the pay of the North American colonies he had played the liberal against the English oligarchy - was an out-and-out vulgar bourgeois.


I've written three different sentences by way of conclusion, but deleted them. Even if the Grauniad doesn't always realise it, comment can be superfluous.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Put it another way - Those on the right tend to believe that their political opponents are wrong, most on the left tend to believe that their political opponents are evil.

Anonymous said...

Wrong, cc, and ill-favoured.