Daily Inspiration Quote by George Mason

Mason’s retirement isn’t posed as a gentlemanly exit; it’s a political indictment delivered in the plain, flint-edged style of an eighteenth-century revolutionary who’d rather be useful than liked. “Not in my Power to do any Good” reads at first as humility, but the subtext is harsher: the system has been arranged so that conscience can’t meaningfully operate inside it. He’s not confessing personal weakness as much as diagnosing institutional capture, the moment when public office becomes a decorative role in decisions already made elsewhere.

The pairing of “common Policy and Justice” is doing heavy rhetorical lifting. Mason refuses the easy dichotomy that asks leaders to choose between what “works” and what is “right.” By yoking the two, he implies that the measures he’s condemning aren’t merely immoral; they’re stupid in the long run, violations of both prudence and principle. “Disgusted” is unusually intimate language for a statesman of the era, a deliberate break from decorum that signals moral nausea, not mere disagreement.

Context sharpens the stakes. Mason, a key Virginian voice behind the Virginia Declaration of Rights, later became a prominent Anti-Federalist, wary of consolidated power and the absence of a federal bill of rights. The line captures a recurring revolutionary hangover: the fight against arbitrary authority produces a new governing machine that can start to resemble the old one. His exit is a warning flare - legitimacy doesn’t come from victory or officeholding, but from policies that can survive the twin tests of justice and basic sense.