Bolingbroke...................................

My favorite optimist notes this is the three hundredth anniversary of England's replacement of the House of Stuart  by George I and the Hanoverians.  He suggests that it was a "close run thing," and that the outcome mattered.  His post on the topic is here.  Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke, was a key player in the drama.  His story can be found here and here.  A few quotes from Bolingbroke follow:

I have observed that in comedies the best actor plays the droll, while some scrub rogue is made the fine gentleman or hero. Thus it is in the farce of life. Wise men spend their time in mirth; it is only fools who are serious.

The shortest and surest way of arriving at real knowledge is to unlearn the lessons we have been taught, to mount the first principles, and take nobody's word about them.

It is a very easy thing to devise good laws; the difficulty is to make them effective. The great mistake is that of looking upon men as virtuous, or thinking that they can be made so by laws; and consequently the greatest art of a politician is to render vices serviceable to the cause of virtue.

Liberty is to the collective body what health is to every individual body. Without health no pleasure can be tasted by man; without liberty, no happiness can be enjoyed by society. 

The confirmed prejudices of a thoughtful life are as hard to change as the confirmed habits of an indolent life; and as some must trifle away age because they trifled away youth, others must labor on in a maze of error because they have wandered there too long to find their way out.