Politics & Power Quote by Ambrose Bierce

Bierce’s line is a deadpan compliment that curdles into an indictment: in America, he suggests, the smarter you are, the less likely you are to be trusted with actual power. It reads like a civics lecture until the punch lands on “exemption,” turning “honored” into a weaponized euphemism. Intelligence isn’t crowned; it’s sidelined.

The specific intent is classic Bierce: to mock a political culture that performs reverence for brains while building incentives that keep brains out of governing. “Our civilization” and “our republican form of government” are staged as proud, institutional phrases, the kind politicians use to sanctify the system. Bierce borrows that ceremonial language to expose its hollow core: a republic that flatters merit in speech but rewards mediocrity in practice, because mediocrity is easier to manage, easier to market, and less likely to disrupt the machinery of patronage.

The subtext is harsher than simple anti-politics. Bierce isn’t arguing that officeholders are universally stupid; he’s pointing at a selection process where ambition, party loyalty, and performance beat expertise. “Cares of office” is doing sly work, too: public service is framed as a burden, and the “intelligent” are spared it, as if governance were a punishment best assigned to the less discerning. The joke implies a civic tragedy: a system so suspicious of intellect that it treats competence as disqualifying.

Context matters. Bierce wrote in the Gilded Age’s long shadow of machine politics, corruption scandals, and boosterish rhetoric. His cynicism isn’t fashionable gloom; it’s reportage with fangs, a journalist’s way of noting that in the republic, the highest compliment intelligence gets is being kept safely away from the levers.