“Tis safter to be that which we destroy
Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy.”
Source: Macbeth
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William Shakespeare 699
English playwright and poet 1564–1616Related quotes

Quoted in The Times, UK (5 August 1980).
1980s and 1990s

“Farewell happy fields,
Where joy forever dwells: Hail, horrors, hail.”
Source: Paradise Lost

A Critical Examination of the Declaration of Rights
Anarchical Fallacies (1843)
Context: That which has no existence cannot be destroyed — that which cannot be destroyed cannot require anything to preserve it from destruction. Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense — nonsense upon stilts. But this rhetorical nonsense ends in the old strain of mischievous nonsense for immediately a list of these pretended natural rights is given, and those are so expressed as to present to view legal rights. And of these rights, whatever they are, there is not, it seems, any one of which any government can, upon any occasion whatever, abrogate the smallest particle.

(19th January 1822) Poetic Sketches, No.2
The London Literary Gazette, 1821-1822