Politics & Power Quote by Douglas Adams

Adams lands the joke with the deadpan confidence of someone pointing out a design flaw so obvious you start wondering why the manual never mentioned it. The line is built on a delicious inversion: ambition, usually treated as evidence of fitness, becomes the disqualifying symptom. If you can navigate the vanity, networking, and appetite for power required to be made President, Adams implies, you have already demonstrated the one trait a democracy can least afford in its chief executive: the desire to be there.

The phrasing matters. Not "elected" but "made" President turns the office into a manufactured product, a creature assembled by party machinery, media incentives, and public projection. It’s a jab at the way leadership is often less discovered than produced - auditioned, packaged, and sold. The formality of "on no account" heightens the absurdity, as if the speaker is issuing a safety warning about a hazardous appliance. Humor becomes a delivery system for cynicism.

The subtext isn’t that presidents are uniquely terrible; it’s that the selection process rewards qualities adjacent to performance rather than performance itself: charisma over competence, confidence over caution, certainty over curiosity. Adams, steeped in British skepticism and sci-fi’s habit of treating institutions as malfunctioning systems, frames politics as a kind of self-sabotaging algorithm. The laugh catches because it’s recognizably true: the traits that win campaigns - relentless self-belief, strategic ruthlessness, a taste for attention - don’t reliably translate into restraint, judgment, or humility once the cameras stop.