Leadership Quote by William Cobbett

A two-step of seduction and punishment: first the eye gets dessert, then the heart gets the bill. Cobbett’s line works because it compresses an entire moral argument into a brisk, almost throwaway cadence. “Please” is polite, even transactional; “plague” is visceral, biblical, the kind of word you use for rot you can’t reason with. The pivot from “eye” to “heart” sketches a theory of modern temptation: surfaces enchant, consequences linger.

As a politician and pamphleteer, Cobbett made a career out of attacking the fraudulence of fashionable opinion, the glittering lies of finance, war-making, and metropolitan taste sold as progress. In that context, the quote reads like a warning label for spectacle. He’s not just condemning pleasure; he’s indicting a culture that trains people to shop with their gaze and then wonder why they feel hollow, anxious, or resentful. The line implies complicity: you are “pleased” by choice, but you are “plagued” as if by an external affliction. That tension is the point. Cobbett is describing how easily agency gets outsourced to appetite.

There’s also a neat political subtext: regimes and elites don’t need to convince you with arguments if they can distract you with ornament. Give the public pageantry, luxury, cheap amusements; let the inner life corrode quietly. Cobbett’s genius here is austerity: nine words, one moral hangover, no sermon required.