Life & Wisdom Quote by Junius

Moral clarity is a luxury Junius doesn’t believe politics can afford. “The lives of the best of us are spent in choosing between evils” lands like a cold compress on idealism: it’s not that good people occasionally compromise, it’s that compromise is the job. Coming from Junius, the famously anonymous polemicist who thrived on exposing the rot in 18th-century British power, the line reads less like private despair than public diagnosis. He’s writing from inside a system where patronage, factional warfare, and imperial management made “clean hands” a kind of fiction.

The phrasing does sly work. “The best of us” flatters the reader into the frame, then denies them the heroic exit. If even the best are trapped choosing evils, virtue becomes less a shining identity than a discipline: the willingness to pick the least damaging option while knowing it will still stain you. The sentence also tightens the screw on those who claim moral purity as a political argument. In Junius’s world, purity is either self-delusion or a cover for cowardice.

There’s an implied warning to reformers and voters alike: don’t wait for immaculate candidates or perfect policies, because power rarely offers them. The real question isn’t “Is this good?” but “Which harm can we live with, and which harm will live on after us?” That’s cynicism with a purpose: not to excuse corruption, but to force accountability in the only arena available - imperfect choices made under pressure.