Leadership Quote by George Savile

Savile’s line lands like a polite sigh from inside the governing class: the problem isn’t scarcity, it’s appetite. “Hardly allows” does sly work here. It shifts excess from a personal vice into a structural feature of being human, the way a statesman might explain corruption or empire not as villainy but as gravity. You can hear the eighteenth-century political mind trying to sound realistic without sounding cruel: restraint is necessary, but don’t expect it to come naturally.

The phrasing “enough of anything” is strategically broad. It covers money and land, but also honor, pleasure, power, even reform. That breadth makes it portable wisdom, yet the subtext is sharply political. In Savile’s Britain, with expanding commerce, patronage networks, and imperial reach, “too much” wasn’t abstract. It was the lived logic of accumulation: once you can get more, you will, and the institutions around you will quietly reward it. The quote reads like a diagnosis of why moderation is so hard to legislate: people don’t stop at sufficiency; they stop at saturation, and saturation arrives late.

There’s also a note of patrician self-implication. Savile doesn’t say “the mob” or “the greedy”; he says “our,” folding the speaker into the indictment. That “our” flatters the audience with honesty while sneaking in a warning: if you build a politics on the assumption of virtuous self-control, you’re building on sand. The clean, balanced sentence is its own argument for balance, even as it doubts we’re capable of it.