Politics & Power Quote by Elia Kazan

Kazan’s line lands like a confession dressed up as a gripe: Hollywood keeps making “power corrupts” stories because the industry can’t imagine power any other way, and because it’s safer to indict “power” in the abstract than to name the people holding it. Coming from a director, it’s also a sideways glance at his own medium. Political cinema is supposed to expose the machinery of government, but Kazan suggests it mostly recycles a pre-sold moral: give someone the levers, watch them rot.

The bite is in “truly believe.” It reads less like idealism than a man insisting he’s not being cynical, even as he delivers a maxim that flatters cynicism. “All power” is totalizing on purpose. It doesn’t just target presidents and bosses; it implicates the director’s chair, the studio, the committee, the crowd. Kazan knew something about committees. His infamous cooperation with HUAC and the moral fallout around it haunt this worldview: if power always corrupts, then everyone’s hands are dirty, and complicity becomes less a personal failure than an operating condition.

The second sentence is the dagger. He frames Hollywood’s politics as a genre habit, almost a formula, which turns righteous filmmaking into another kind of institutional self-protection. By treating corruption as inevitable, political films can feel bold while leaving audiences with resignation instead of agency. It’s critique as catharsis: you get to be appalled, then you get to go home.