Politics & Power Quote by W. Somerset Maugham

Maugham’s line lands like a civilized warning delivered with a blade hidden in the cuff. A playwright’s sentence, it’s built for the stage: set up the principle (freedom is fragile), introduce the temptation (comfort, money), then tighten the trap with the closing twist. The real sting is the irony clause, which doesn’t just moralize; it diagnoses a feedback loop. Trade liberty for security and you don’t end up secure. You end up ruled by the very apparatus you empowered to protect your ease.

The intent is less revolutionary than prophylactic. Maugham isn’t romanticizing freedom as an abstract good; he’s treating it as a practical precondition for keeping anything else. The subtext is distrust of bargains offered in a calm voice: the promise that you can “temporarily” suspend rights to stabilize markets, quell disorder, or restore normal life. Once a nation trains itself to prioritize private comfort over public autonomy, it also trains itself to accept surveillance, censorship, and managed truth as normal costs of doing business. That’s how the loss becomes voluntary, even self-congratulatory.

Context matters: Maugham lived through two world wars, mass propaganda, economic collapse, and the steady normalization of authoritarian solutions dressed up as efficiency. His era watched democracies hollow themselves out in the name of order and recovery. The line’s cleverness is that it refuses the usual consolation prize: you don’t even get to keep the bribe. When freedom goes, money becomes counterfeit (unstable, confiscable, corruptible) and comfort becomes conditional (granted, monitored, revocable). The quote works because it treats freedom not as a halo, but as infrastructure.