We have seen the best of our time: machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders, follow us disquietly to our graves.

This line is spoken in Shakespeare’s tragedy *King Lear* during the play’s final movement, when the political and familial order has collapsed into betrayal and violence. The speaker is the Earl of Gloucester, an aging nobleman who has been deceived by his illegitimate son Edmund and cast out after being accused of treason. Having witnessed the unraveling of the kingdom and the treachery of those closest to him, Gloucester expresses a bleak sense that his generation has already passed its peak and must now endure the consequences—plots, emptiness, and disorder—until death.

The quotation compresses one of *King Lear*’s central themes: the sense that moral and political decay outlasts any individual’s ability to repair it. “We have seen the best of our time” suggests not only personal aging but a broader historical decline, as if the world itself has moved from stability into corruption. The catalogue—“machinations, hollowness, treachery”—names both deliberate plotting and the emptiness behind public loyalties. The final image, being followed “disquietly to our graves,” conveys that such disorder is not a temporary crisis but a haunting condition that shadows human life to its end.