Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Louis Stevenson

A good line of political contempt works best when it pretends to be a shared secret. Stevenson’s jab at Parliament flatters the reader into complicity: “we all know” is less an observation than a dare. If you hesitate, you’ve already failed the test of clear-eyed modernity. Then comes the twist of the knife: not outrage, not disappointment, but shame. That’s sharper than anger because it implicates everyone in the room. Corruption isn’t just “out there” in Westminster; it’s a national humiliation, tolerated, normalized, and therefore owned.

Stevenson was a novelist and essayist steeped in Victorian respectability, which makes the move even more surgical. He doesn’t sermonize about constitutional theory or policy detail. He reduces an entire governing institution to something unspeakably familiar, like a family scandal nobody mentions at dinner. The economy of the sentence is the point: Parliament’s failings are so established they don’t require evidence, only recognition.

The subtext is a critique of performative democracy, the gap between lofty civic myths and the grubby mechanics of power. “Parliament” here isn’t merely a chamber; it’s a symbol of bargain-making, patronage, hypocrisy, and the cozy self-protection of elites. By framing the public’s response as shame, Stevenson suggests a society that has stopped believing in reform and started adapting its self-image around cynicism. The line isn’t asking for better leaders so much as exposing a culture that has made peace with being disappointed.