Politics & Power Quote by Louis Adolphe Thiers

Thiers is smuggling a survival manual into a sentence: politics will chew up anyone who treats it like a moral melodrama, but it will also punish anyone who treats it like a parlor game. “Nothing tragically” is not callousness so much as strategic emotional discipline. Tragedy implies inevitability, grand forces, noble suffering. Thiers is telling you to refuse that script. If you narrate politics as fate, you stop doing the one thing it demands: making choices under pressure, revising them, and living with the compromises.

“Everything seriously” lands with a colder weight. It’s an instruction to respect consequences even when motives are petty and the cast is mediocre. The phrase works because it splits affect from action: keep your feelings on a short leash, keep your attention laser-focused. In other words, don’t catastrophize; do triage.

The context matters. Thiers lived through regime whiplash: revolution, empire, restoration, another revolution, another empire, and the battered birth of the Third Republic. In that world, politics wasn’t a debate-club abstraction; it was the machinery that decided who ate, who fled, and who got shot. Thiers himself embodied the line’s uneasy double meaning. As a master of order and expedience, he could treat upheaval as a problem to manage rather than a tragedy to mourn, and still insist on seriousness when it came to preserving the state. The subtext is almost grimly modern: if you want to stay effective, you can’t afford either despair or innocence.