Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas Clarkson

Avarice, Clarkson implies, doesn’t just chase profit; it hunts privacy. “Few retreats” evokes the comforting fantasy that there are still untouched corners where a person, a community, or a moral principle can withdraw from the market’s demands. Then he punctures it with a single invasive image: the “penetrating eye.” Greed becomes not a blunt appetite but a surveillance organ, alert, restless, and humiliatingly intimate. The line works because it shifts avarice from an individual vice to a social force with eyesight, reach, and entitlement.

Clarkson’s context matters. As a leading British abolitionist, he spent years documenting how the slave economy threaded itself through respectable life: shipping, insurance, sugar, politics, even the teacup. In that world, there were no clean hands and no safe havens. The “retreats” could be literal (remote coasts, colonial outposts, the holds of ships) and institutional (churches, courts, Parliament), places that liked to imagine themselves above commerce. Clarkson is warning that once an economy is built on extraction, it develops an almost supernatural talent for finding new rooms to enter and new alibis to borrow.

The subtext is accusatory: if you believe you’re outside the system, it’s probably because you haven’t looked closely enough at who pays for your comfort. Clarkson’s moral strategy is to make complicity feel inescapable, not to induce despair, but to remove the last refuge of indifference.