Politics & Power Quote by Horace Walpole

Walpole’s compliment arrives with its teeth still in. “I do not admire politicians” isn’t a casual preference; it’s a social verdict from an aristocratic man of letters who watched power up close and learned to distrust the performance. Admiration implies uplift, even identification. Walpole refuses that intimacy. Politicians, in his framing, are not models of virtue but practitioners of a trade.

The twist is the grudging fairness of the second clause: “but when they are excellent in their way, one cannot help allowing them their due.” “In their way” is doing heavy work. It cordons politics off from the moral universe Walpole inhabits as a writer and observer, treating it as a specialized craft with its own metrics: strategy, coalition-building, timing, the ability to survive. Excellence here is not goodness; it’s competence under ugly conditions. Walpole’s language (“cannot help”) suggests an involuntary concession, like crediting a chess opponent you dislike.

Context matters: this is 18th-century Britain, where patronage, faction, and parliamentary maneuvering made government look less like noble service and more like managed self-interest. Walpole (son of Britain’s first de facto prime minister) knew the machinery personally. His sentence distills a modern dilemma before it had modern vocabulary: the uneasy respect we grant to effective operators in systems we suspect are compromised. It’s a line designed for cocktail conversation, but its subtext is bleakly durable: politics rarely earns love, yet competence still demands recognition, if only to keep cynicism from turning into self-deception.