Daily Inspiration Quote by Auberon Herbert

Auberon Herbert is trying to make coercion look less like a necessary evil and more like a slow-acting poison. His line turns the usual defense of “order” on its head: even when a force-backed system appears “great” - stable, expansive, efficient - its success is purchased by degrading the very human capacities that make a society worth having. The withering isn’t sudden tyranny; it’s bureaucratic, habitual, almost polite. Force doesn’t just punish dissent, it trains everyone to outsource judgment.

The intent is unmistakably liberal in the 19th-century English sense: suspicion of the growing administrative state, of imperial confidence, of laws that claim moral authority while relying on compulsion. Herbert, a leading voluntaryist, wants readers to notice how power reshapes character. When obedience becomes a civic virtue, the best faculties - initiative, moral courage, intellectual independence, the knack for cooperation without supervision - stop getting exercised. People learn to comply, to game the rules, to demand enforcement rather than persuasion. Rulers, too, atrophy: they begin to confuse command with competence.

What makes the sentence work is its patient certainty. “Never yet” and “slowly” read like someone pointing to a long historical record rather than issuing a prophecy. “Sustained by force” is the tell: Herbert isn’t denying that systems can be built with coercion; he’s arguing they can’t remain “great” without corroding their human substrate. It’s a warning aimed at reformers as much as autocrats: if your plan requires force to endure, expect the cost to be paid in the inner lives of the people you claim to improve.