A Great Quote
April 15th, 2007
From A Nation of Serfs? – page 212 (paperback edition). A British Naval officer in 1799, on the introduction of a tax on income:
It is a vile, Jacobian, jumped up Jack-in-Office piece of impertinence – is a true Briton to have no privacy? Are the fruits of his labour and toil to be picked over, farthing by farthing, by the pimply minions of bureaucracy?”
As I have complained before, why don’t public figures have this kind of grasp of our language anymore?
I somehow can’t see me discussing Elizabeth May and Stephan Dion in the future without referencing it as a “Jacobian piece of impertinence”, or looking at Kyoto without mentioning the “pimply minions of bureaucracy.”
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