Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Shea

Power rarely arrives wearing a “limited edition” label. Shea’s line is blunt on purpose, a compressed warning about the psychology of ambition: the person reaching for authority almost never imagines themselves as a temporary custodian. They imagine themselves as the exception to the rules that bind everyone else. “Seeks” is the tell. It’s not about the reluctant leader drafted by circumstance; it’s about the self-selected striver, the one who chases the levers and, once there, starts reaching for the hidden levers behind them.

The subtext is less “all leaders are villains” than “systems should be designed as if they might be.” Shea pushes you to treat the pursuit of power as a risk factor, not a credential. The phrase “absolute power” isn’t merely dictatorship; it’s the impulse to remove friction: oversight, elections, audits, dissent, even the need to persuade. In this reading, absolute power is convenience. It’s the fantasy of governance without argument, of control without accountability, of outcomes without negotiation.

Context matters: Shea is best known for co-authoring The Illuminatus! Trilogy, a countercultural, conspiracy-saturated satire that distrusts official narratives and the people who benefit from them. That background gives the quote its edge. It’s not a civics-textbook caution; it’s a paranoiac’s clarity sharpened into a maxim. The line works because it’s accusatory enough to sting, simple enough to repeat, and cynical enough to feel true in any era where “temporary measures” keep becoming permanent.