“Thus Vice nurs'd Ingenuity,
Which join'd with Time and Industry,
Had carry'd Life's Conveniences,
It's real Pleasures, Comforts, Ease,
To such a Height, the very Poor
Liv'd better than the Rich before.”

—  Bernard Mandeville, book The Fable of the Bees

"The Grumbling Hive", line 197, p. 11
The Fable of the Bees (1714)

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Bernard Mandeville photo
Bernard Mandeville35
Anglo-Dutch writer and physician 1670–1733

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“The fallacy of that book is, that Mandeville defines neither vices nor benefits. He reckons among vices everything that gives pleasure. He takes the narrowest system of morality, monastick morality, which holds pleasure itself to be a vice, such as eating salt with our fish, because it makes it taste better; and he reckons wealth as a publick benefit, which is by no means always true. Pleasure of itself is not a vice.”

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