Leadership Quote by George Savile

Reason is supposed to be civilization’s clean, bright instrument; Savile flips it and shows the grime on the handle. “Nothing has an uglier look” isn’t a claim about logic’s aesthetics so much as a confession about our politics of self. We don’t dislike bad arguments, he implies. We dislike losing. When reason points away from our preferred outcome, we suddenly discover its “ugliness” - its coldness, its pedantry, its inconvenient demand that feelings and loyalties submit to evidence.

Savile, a working politician in 18th-century Britain, is writing from inside a culture where “reason” was the Enlightenment’s public virtue and Parliament’s idealized method: debate, persuasion, improvement. The line quietly punctures that self-image. It suggests that rational discourse in politics is less a shared commitment than a weapon everyone praises until it’s aimed at them. That’s the subtext: reason is treated as neutral only when it agrees with us; otherwise it becomes suspect, elitist, cruel, or “out of touch” - an early diagnosis of what we’d now call motivated reasoning.

The craft of the sentence is its sting. “To us” makes the indictment collective, not merely personal, implicating the reader without sermonizing. “When it is not on our side” frames reason as an ally in factional combat, not an arbiter above it. Savile isn’t arguing against rationality; he’s warning that our attachment to it is conditional, and that the ugliest thing in politics may be how quickly principle becomes posture.