Daily Inspiration Quote by Samuel Richardson

Richardson’s line lands like a moral x-ray: it doesn’t flatter the reader with lofty ideals, it fingers a quiet appetite we’d rather call “ambition” or “leadership.” “Every one, more or less” is the trapdoor. He’s not talking about tyrants in history books; he’s talking about ordinary people who enjoy being deferred to, obeyed, needed. Power isn’t an exotic vice. It’s a domestic one.

The pivot comes with “yet,” where affection turns to indictment. Richardson draws a crucial distinction between possessing power and desiring it. The subtext is less “power corrupts” than “the craving for it is already a kind of corruption.” Those who most want authority may be chasing not responsibility but relief: relief from uncertainty, from equality, from having to negotiate. Wanting power can signal an inability to tolerate limits, and that trait doesn’t improve once someone gets a title.

As a novelist, Richardson is writing with the instincts of a social anatomist. In the 18th-century world of patronage, strict hierarchy, and reputational warfare, status was currency, and moral character was supposed to justify rank. His warning reads like a rebuttal to that comforting story: the loudest claimants to merit are often the least safe bets.

What makes the sentence work is its calm, almost resigned tone. No thunder, no sermon. Just a bleakly observant rule of human behavior: the people best suited to hold power are often the ones least enchanted by it.