Leadership Quote by Algernon Sydney

Sydney is doing something more unsettling than preaching humility: he is building a political case out of human imperfection. “Many things are unknown to the wisest” punctures the comforting fantasy that governance can be safely entrusted to a select class of superior minds. He’s writing in an England still raw from civil war, regicide, restoration, and the renewed pretensions of divine-right monarchy. In that context, uncertainty isn’t just an epistemic problem; it’s an argument against concentrated, unquestionable power.

The second clause sharpens the blade. Even “the best men” cannot “wholly divest themselves of passions and affections.” Sydney isn’t moralizing about emotion; he’s pointing to structural bias. Affections pull on judgment: loyalty, ambition, resentment, favoritism. By acknowledging that virtue doesn’t cancel appetite, he undercuts the royalist claim that a “good” ruler makes absolute authority safe. Character is not a substitute for constraints.

Then comes the quiet radicalism: “nothing can or ought to be permanent but that which is perfect.” Permanence is treated as a privilege, not a default. Institutions, laws, and regimes should be revisable precisely because they’re made by fallible people operating with partial knowledge and private motives. The word “ought” matters: this isn’t merely how history works; it’s a normative demand for political flexibility - a justification for constitutional limits, accountability, and even resistance when power hardens into heredity or dogma.

Sydney’s subtext is republican and anti-absolutist: if humans can’t be perfected, neither can their rulers. The safest politics is the one designed to survive our best intentions.