Quote of the Day (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, on Politics, Fear and Folly)

“In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.”—English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, edited by Henry Nelson Coleridge (1836)

 

In the U.S., what began as one man’s fear—that warning citizens to take elementary precautions against a pandemic might damage the stock market and, hence, his electoral prospects this November—led not only to folly, but also tragedy: an economy that, despite his wishes, crashed anyway—and now, more than 110,000 deaths from COVID-19.