Politics & Power Quote by Rebecca West

West loads that sentence like a tiny incendiary device: a “drop of treason” as tonic, not toxin. Coming from a writer who watched Europe’s political nerves get tested in real time - suffragism, fascism, world war, appeasement - the line isn’t a cute paradox. It’s a warning about what happens when civic life becomes too hygienic, too obedient, too eager to confuse comfort with stability.

“Treason” here is less about selling secrets than refusing the national lullaby. West treats dissent as a circulatory necessity: something that has to be in the bloodstream to keep a society awake. The “drop” matters. She isn’t romanticizing revolution or advocating chaos; she’s prescribing a controlled impurity, the minimum viable dose of disloyalty required to keep a nation from mistaking conformity for cohesion. The phrase also needles masculine respectability (“All men”) in a way that echoes her feminist politics: the respectable citizen-soldier type is precisely who needs permission to be difficult.

Then she lands the insult: “sleepy pears.” Nations don’t collapse in her image with a bang; they over-ripen. Pears go soft quietly, even prettily, turning mushy from the inside while still looking intact. That’s West’s subtext about decadence and complacency: decline as a kind of drowsy sweetness, a loss of edge. The wit is doing political work. By making softness feel faintly ridiculous, she reframes dissent not as antisocial behavior but as an adult refusal to be lulled - the necessary abrasion that keeps democracies from sliding into comfortable, defenseless sleep.