Daily Inspiration Quote by Auberon Herbert

"I venture to prophesy" is a masterclass in Victorian restraint masking real alarm. Herbert doesn’t thunder like a demagogue; he tiptoes into the role of seer. That opening verb, venture, is doing double duty: it signals humility (I may be wrong) while also granting himself moral credibility (I’m not craving attention, I’m reluctantly reporting what reason compels). The result is a forecast that feels less like sensationalism and more like an educated grimace.

Then comes the phrase that bites: "a bitter and an evil time". Bitter is experiential, the taste of daily life going sour - resentment, hardship, social friction. Evil is moral, a judgment that the coming crisis won’t just be unpleasant but wrong, corrosive to character and institutions. Herbert’s pairing suggests a two-front catastrophe: material strain plus ethical degradation. He’s warning not merely of suffering, but of the kinds of political solutions suffering tempts people to accept.

Context matters. Herbert, a classical liberal and early libertarian, spent his career arguing against coercive state power, even when draped in benevolent language. In late 19th-century Britain, mass politics, imperial ambition, and expanding administrative government were rising forces; so were collectivist currents that promised security and justice through compulsion. Herbert’s subtext is that "progress" can smuggle in new forms of domination, and that moral confidence in doing good can become the most efficient excuse for doing harm.

The line works because it refuses comfort. It doesn’t offer a program, only a diagnosis: the future will test whether a society can chase reform without surrendering liberty, and whether decent intentions can survive the machinery built to enforce them.