David Hume Quotes
Absolute monarchy,... is the easiest death, the true Euthanasia of the BRITISH constitution.
Hume, David. Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary. Edited by Eugene F. Miller, Liberty Fund, 1987, p. 53.
The statement so offended the Lords—the highest court of England—that he was imprisoned by the Lords and not released until he had recanted the position. The argument goes on today in many countries incuding the United States.
McClellan thought President Lincoln an oaf and toyed with the idea of taking over. Ironically, he was a terrible battle general and never would have any reasonable success on the battlefield.
Cromwell was not opposed to monarchy per se as long as it was reasonably checked. He saw Charles II as a terrible monarch. After deposing Charles, he and his associates had to come up with some form of government. As “Lord Protector” he was a de facto monarch without the trappings.
David Hume, Hume strove to create a naturalistic science of man that examined the psychological basis of human nature. Hume argued against the existence of innate ideas, positing that all human knowledge derives solely from experience. This places him with Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and George Berkeley as a British Empiricist.
