"All men would be tyrants if they could"
About this Quote
A journalist’s barb disguised as a moral law: Defoe’s line lands because it doesn’t accuse a single king, party, or church. It indicts the default setting of human appetite when consequences evaporate. The sting is in the conditional: “if they could.” Tyranny isn’t portrayed as a rare pathology but as an opportunity structure. Give ordinary people unchecked latitude, the quote suggests, and many will reach for domination with the same casualness they reach for comfort.
The subtext is press-era realism, not courtroom philosophy. Defoe wrote in a Britain still haunted by civil war, regicide, restoration, and the aftershocks of the Glorious Revolution; authority felt both necessary and suspect. In that churn, “liberty” could sound like principle in the mouth and like license in the street. Defoe’s journalism thrives on that tension: he’s not romantic about the masses, and he’s not sentimental about rulers. He understands power as a temptation that scales down as easily as it scales up - from monarchs to employers to husbands to any man who finds himself unanswerable.
What makes the line work rhetorically is its plainness. No metaphor, no ornament, just a blunt hypothesis with an implied warning: design institutions as if virtue will fail. It’s proto-modern in its cynicism, anticipating the checks-and-balances logic that treats ambition less as a personal flaw than as a predictable fuel. Defoe isn’t preaching despair; he’s doing what hard-nosed journalists do best - refusing to flatter his readers, then daring them to build a society that doesn’t require flattery to function.
The subtext is press-era realism, not courtroom philosophy. Defoe wrote in a Britain still haunted by civil war, regicide, restoration, and the aftershocks of the Glorious Revolution; authority felt both necessary and suspect. In that churn, “liberty” could sound like principle in the mouth and like license in the street. Defoe’s journalism thrives on that tension: he’s not romantic about the masses, and he’s not sentimental about rulers. He understands power as a temptation that scales down as easily as it scales up - from monarchs to employers to husbands to any man who finds himself unanswerable.
What makes the line work rhetorically is its plainness. No metaphor, no ornament, just a blunt hypothesis with an implied warning: design institutions as if virtue will fail. It’s proto-modern in its cynicism, anticipating the checks-and-balances logic that treats ambition less as a personal flaw than as a predictable fuel. Defoe isn’t preaching despair; he’s doing what hard-nosed journalists do best - refusing to flatter his readers, then daring them to build a society that doesn’t require flattery to function.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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