Politics & Power Quote by George Mason

A revolution is a poor disguise for a bad habit. Mason is pointing at the rot beneath polite society: if a culture trains you early to treat other people as less than fully human, that training doesn’t stay neatly contained. It becomes muscle memory. “Habituated from our Infancy” is the brutal part. He isn’t blaming a few villains; he’s describing a system that educates the conscience out of you before you’re old enough to notice. The syntax does its own moral work, piling clause on clause the way custom piles up justifications.

The target is slavery, and the argument is strategically double-edged. On the surface, it’s an abolitionist warning: trampling “the Rights of Human Nature” degrades the enslaved and violates first principles that the revolutionary generation is busy proclaiming. Underneath, it’s a warning to fellow elites about themselves. Mason frames cruelty as a kind of civic disease that spreads inward: even “generous” and “liberal” sentiments don’t survive unchanged; they’re “extinguished” or, worse, left alive but weakened. That “if not extinguished” is a devastating concession, implying that some people retain moral feeling yet still participate - a portrait of complicity, not ignorance.

Context matters: Mason helped draft the Virginia Declaration of Rights and later refused to sign the Constitution, partly over the lack of a bill of rights. He’s haunted by the gap between revolutionary rhetoric and lived practice. The quote works because it treats hypocrisy not as a scandal but as a formative force: a nation built on liberty cannot keep manufacturing un-liberty without reshaping its own moral palate.