“Government is an evil; it is only the thoughtlessness and vices of men that make it a necessary evil. When all men are good and wise, government will of itself decay.”

English writer and Romantic poet

Percy Bysshe Shelley was an English Romantic poet and writer. He lived from 1792 to 1822, and is remembered as one of the major figures of English Romanticism. Shelley wrote with a radical edge in both his poetry and his political and social thought. He did not gain wide fame in his lifetime, but his reputation grew steadily after his death, and he later influenced poets such as Robert Browning, Algernon Swinburne, Thomas Hardy, and W. B. Yeats.