Daily Inspiration Quote by David Hume

Popularity and patriotism look like virtues until Hume treats them as infrastructure: the well-worn road that reliably carries ambitious people to coercive rule. The sting is in "still" and "beaten". He is not warning about an occasional demagogue; he is describing a repeatable political technology. In Hume's cool, empirical style, mass approval is less a mandate than a solvent that dissolves institutional resistance. Once the crowd is with you, the usual checks start to look like petty obstacles to the national will.

"Patriotism" does the heavier lifting. It sanctifies power by laundering self-interest through collective identity. A leader can frame personal ambition as service, aggression as defense, dissent as disloyalty. Hume's skepticism toward human rationality and his attention to the passions sit underneath the line: people are moved by belonging, fear, pride, and the thrill of moral certainty more than by careful argument. Tyranny doesn't arrive wearing a villain's cape; it arrives draped in flags and applause.

The context is an Enlightenment thinker watching Britain wrestle with party conflict, imperial wars, and the churn of public opinion in an expanding print culture. Hume distrusts both courtly absolutism and romanticized "the people". He is diagnosing a paradox liberals still live with: democratic energy can be the very force that authorizes anti-democratic ends. The quote works because it refuses comfort. It implies the danger isn't only in corrupt institutions; it's in our favorite shortcuts to legitimacy.