Politics & Power Quote by William Hazlitt

Hazlitt’s line is a backhanded compliment disguised as a diagnosis: in a political culture built on patronage and deference, honesty isn’t a virtue you can simply adopt; it has to be trained into you by social position and habit. “Dissenter” here isn’t just a religious label. It’s a whole civic temperament forged outside the Church of England’s establishment - Nonconformists who learned, by necessity, to distrust official pieties, organize independently, and answer to a community rather than to a court or a club.

The wit is in the trap he sets. He appears to praise a minority group while really indicting the majority. If only Dissenters can be “honest politicians,” then the political mainstream is structurally compromised, not merely occasionally corrupt. Hazlitt’s cynicism is sociological: character is less about personal morality than about incentives, upbringing, and the subtle bribery of belonging. “Born and bred” implies that the system doesn’t just tempt politicians into dishonesty; it produces them that way, grooming pliable men who can speak the language of principle while doing the arithmetic of self-interest.

Context matters. Writing in the wake of the French Revolution’s aftershocks, amid fierce battles over reform, representation, and religious tests, Hazlitt watched “respectability” function as a political technology. Dissenters, barred from full civic participation for long stretches, became living reminders that the establishment’s idea of legitimacy was exclusion. The line flatters their independence, but it’s really a warning: when power and conformity overlap, sincerity becomes a kind of dissent.