Daily Inspiration Quote by Elliot Richardson

Power, Richardson is warning, is not a title you hold but a leverage you exercise. The sentence is built like a lawyerly trap: it grants two seemingly different scenarios - voluntary restraint or forced restraint - then collapses them into the same outcome. Either way, the big power "in effect" forfeits its edge. That phrase does a lot of work. It sidesteps moral debate and focuses on results, the world as it behaves rather than as we wish it would.

The specific intent is strategic, not macho. Richardson is sketching a cold incentive structure: if a large state routinely signals it will not use its capabilities, rivals plan around that restraint; allies start hedging; deterrence thins. The subtext is that credibility is the real currency of power, and credibility requires an occasional willingness to spend. He also smuggles in a critique of self-congratulating restraint. In geopolitics, choosing not to use strength can look less like virtue than like uncertainty, and uncertainty invites tests.

Contextually, Richardson belongs to the postwar American governing class that lived through Korea, Vietnam, detente, and the long argument over whether US power should be constrained by law, institutions, and public fatigue. As a lawyer and statesman, he understood both the appeal of limits and the penalties for advertising them. The line reads like a warning to policymakers tempted to treat "superpower" as an identity rather than a practice: if you can't, or won't, act like one, everyone else will stop acting like you are one.