Politics & Power Quote by Ambrose Bierce

Bierce doesn’t bother arguing politics; he detonates it. By defining “Conservative” as someone “enamored of existing evils,” he drags the word out of its self-flattering costume - prudence, stability, tradition - and pins it to a vice: affection for harm simply because it’s familiar. The bite lands harder because he makes “statesman” the subject, not “voter.” This isn’t a jab at ordinary people clinging to comfort; it’s an accusation that the professional steward of the public good has learned to love the machinery that grinds the public down.

Then comes the second blade: the Liberal, in Bierce’s view, isn’t a savior but a rival manufacturer. “Replace them with others” collapses reform into a cynical swap: new policies, new slogans, same human appetite for power and unintended consequences. The joke is symmetrical, but not neutral. Bierce’s real target is moral self-congratulation - the way ideologies sell themselves as cures while quietly preserving the need for patients.

Context matters. Bierce wrote as a journalist shaped by the brutality of the Civil War and the swaggering corruption of the Gilded Age, when “statesmanship” often meant managing monopolies, patronage, and racial hierarchy with a straight face. His dictionary form is a satirical weapon: it mimics the authority of reference books while insisting that official language is itself part of the scam. The subtext is bleakly modern: politics is less a contest between good and bad than a competition over which evils get to feel respectable.