Politics & Power Quote by Fawn M. Brodie

Politics, Brodie suggests, isn’t a calling so much as a craving. Her line cuts against the civic-myth version of public life - the idea that people enter politics out of duty, vision, or competence - and replaces it with a cooler psychological inventory: power, affection, applause. The word “insatiable” does the real work. It implies politics is less a career than an appetite that can’t be satisfied by ordinary success, a hunger that keeps demanding new rooms, new audiences, new leverage.

Brodie was a biographer steeped in motive-hunting; she wrote famous lives by reading ambition as biography’s engine. That sensibility shows here: political behavior is framed as a symptom. Even “friendship” is demoted from virtue to need, lumped with “adulation” as if intimacy in public life often comes prepackaged as loyalty, flattery, and the intoxicating warmth of a crowd that can turn cold. The “combination of both” is a sly nod to how power and affection feed each other in politics: influence buys attention, attention legitimizes influence, and the loop becomes self-sustaining.

The subtext is not that every politician is a monster, but that the system rewards dependency. Campaigns, parties, and media ecosystems are built to keep egos hungry and constantly auditioning for approval. Brodie’s intent feels diagnostic, almost clinical: if you want to understand political actors, stop taking their stated ideals at face value and watch what they seem unable to live without.