Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from chapter 10 of Henry Adams’s 1907 volume, The Education of Henry Adams, as quoted on page 233 of Joseph Epstein’s April 9th, 2014, American Spectator essay, “The Cracked Vessel,” as this essay is reprinted (and retitled as “George Kennan”) in the 2018 collection of some of Epstein’s essays titled The Ideal of Culture:

The effect of power and publicity on all men is the aggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim’s sympathies; a diseased appetite, like a passion for drink or perverted tastes; one can scarcely use expressions too strong to describe the violence of egotism it stimulates.