Thursday, September 16, 2010

Quote of the Day (William Hazlitt, on Liberty and Power)


“The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.”—English journalist and literary critic William Hazlitt (1778-1830), Political Essays, With Sketches of Public Characters (1819)

The image accompanying this post is a self-portrait of the great essayist—in its way, as evocative as the one he painted of his friend Charles Lamb that I mentioned recently. The self-portrait, created when Hazlitt was only 24, captures the duality, the war between the light and dark sides of our character, hinted at in this quotation.

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