And to say that society ought to be governed by the opinion of the wisest and best, though true, is useless. Whose opinion is to decide who are the wisest and best?
Interpretation
This quote highlights the challenge of determining who should be considered the wisest and best to govern society, making the concept of wise governance complex.
Thomas B. Macaulay's quote reflects on the paradox of relying on the wisdom of the best individuals for societal governance. While it seems logical to trust the insights of the most knowledgeable and moral leaders, the real issue arises in identifying who qualifies as 'the wisest and best.' This ambiguity complicates the notion of what constitutes effective and just leadership, as it prompts questions about biases and subjective judgments inherent in such evaluations.
In practice
This quote can be used during a debate on leadership qualifications.
None of the modes by which a magistrate is appointed, popular election, the accident of the lot, or the accident of birth, affords, as far as we can perceive, much security for his being wiser than any of his neighbours. The chance of his being wiser than all his neighbours together is still smaller.
Your Constitution is all sail and no anchor.
I wish I was as sure of anything as he is of everything.
To punish a man because he has committed a crime, or because he is believed, though unjustly, to have committed a crime, is not persecution. To punish a man, because we infer from the nature of some doctrine which he holds, or from the conduct of other persons who hold the same doctrines with him, that he will commit a crime, is persecution, and is, in every case, foolish and wicked.
Mere negation, mere Epicurean infidelity, as Lord Bacon most justly observes, has never disturbed the peace of the world. It furnishes no motive for action; it inspires no enthusiasm; it has no missionaries, no crusades, no martyrs.
What a blessing it is to love books as I love them;- to be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal!
The only thing that made me, or any of us, special was that no one in the whole of history would ever see the universe exactly the same way any other of us saw it.
That day, I really believed that I had grasped something and that henceforth my life would be changed. But insights cannot be held for ever. Like water, the world ripples across you and for a while you take on its colours. Then it recedes, and leaves you face to face with the void you carry inside yourself, confronting that central inadequacy of soul which you must learn to rub shoulders with and to combat, and which, paradoxically, may be our surest impetus.
No birth is an accident, No experience is without meaning, and no life is without value.
I had been brought up in a church which decides everything and permits no doubts, so that having rejected one article of faith I was forced to reject the rest.
The spiritual life is part of the human essence. It is a defining characteristic of human nature, without which human nature is not fully human.
A Baby Sermon- The lighting and thunder, they go and they come: But the stars and the stillness are always at home
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