Success Quote by George Mason

Power, Mason insists, is on loan. That framing matters: it turns government from a natural ruler into a hired instrument, and it turns citizens from passive subjects into the original owners of authority. In the late-18th-century American argument over what the new republic should become, this was not a feel-good abstraction. It was a warning label.

The line works because it targets a temptation that shows up precisely when politics gets procedural: once you have associations and agreements, you start treating the paperwork as the source of legitimacy. Mason yanks legitimacy back upstream. Constitutions, compacts, and institutions are downstream products; the headwaters are the people themselves. The subtext is a rebuke to elites who would use legal formality as camouflage for permanent power. If power is derived, it can be re-derived, revised, revoked.

Mason’s context sharpens the edge. A Virginian and a key voice pushing for a Bill of Rights, he worried that the new federal architecture could harden into the very kind of distant authority the Revolution claimed to overthrow. His maxim is democratic, but not naive: it assumes power’s default behavior is to consolidate, to forget its source, to start speaking in the royal “we.”

Rhetorically, the phrase “never lose sight” is doing heavy lifting. It’s not urging occasional remembrance; it demands constant suspicion. In Mason’s hands, popular sovereignty isn’t a ceremonial slogan. It’s a standing audit of every agreement, every alliance, every institution that claims to act “for” the people without being answerable to them.