Success Quote by Charles Edison

It’s a defensive little manifesto from a man whose name already carries the whiff of inherited power. Charles Edison can’t invoke “King Charles” without summoning the whole gallery of cautionary monarchs: divine right, overreach, a ruler mistaken for a state. The line works because it anticipates suspicion. A businessman - especially one with a famous surname and real access to influence - knows how easily leadership reads as control. So he gets ahead of the charge: don’t confuse my authority with absolutism.

The phrasing is telling. “Go in for tyranny” sounds almost like a hobby, as if despotism is merely a career track he’s declining. That casualness is strategic; it shrinks the threat of his own power by treating tyranny as theatrics (“play the part”), not a structural possibility. Yet the reference to “King Charles” also admits the risk: history is full of confident men who believed they were merely governing until the crowd decided they were ruling.

“I hate tyranny in any field of human activity” broadens the claim beyond politics into workplaces, families, institutions - the everyday arenas where businessmen often exercise the most direct coercion. That’s the subtextual tightrope: he’s presenting himself as a modern executive-statesman who prizes consent and restraint, while quietly asking to be trusted with the very levers that make tyranny possible.

Read in its era - when industrial and governmental power were increasingly centralized, and “strong leadership” was a seductive pitch - it’s less a lofty moral statement than a reputational inoculation: authority, yes; absolutism, no.