Daily Inspiration Quote by Kamisese Mara

"If the constitution goes, I go" is the kind of line that tries to turn law into a lifeline: cut one, and the speaker agrees to bleed out with it. Coming from Kamisese Mara, Fiji's founding prime minister and a central architect of its postcolonial state, the sentence reads as both vow and warning. Its intent is to bind personal legitimacy to institutional legitimacy, making any assault on constitutional order feel like an assault on the nation itself - not just on a government, but on the rules that keep power from becoming purely tribal, military, or transactional.

The subtext is canny. Mara isn't only pledging principle; he's staking a claim to the moral high ground in a political culture where constitutions were contested terrain, repeatedly rewritten under the pressure of coups, ethnic politics, and competing visions of sovereignty. By framing his departure as automatic if the constitution collapses, he presents himself as the opposite of the strongman: a leader who will not outlive the document that authorizes him. It's a statement designed to shame opportunists and to reassure anxious citizens and external partners that someone at the center still treats the rulebook as sacred.

There's also a quieter power move embedded in its simplicity. It makes Mara the human embodiment of constitutional continuity: if you want to discard him, you have to discard the constitution with him. In a fragile democracy, that rhetorical fuse can deter disruption - or at least clarify the stakes when disruption arrives.