Politics & Power Quote by Anthony Trollope

Trollope’s jab lands because it flips a civic virtue into a vice: the “fault” isn’t corruption, stupidity, or cowardice, but eagerness. In an age that liked to imagine politics as moral crusade, he suggests the more common reality is something closer to bureaucratic vanity - leaders addicted to the feeling of motion, mistaking activity for judgment.

The line’s bite comes from its plainness. “Do something” sounds like common sense until Trollope frames it as an ambition shared by “all” politicians, not a few bad apples. That totalizing swipe turns good intentions into a category error. Government, in his view, shouldn’t be a theater for personal initiative; it’s a machine whose small adjustments ripple outward. The subtext is conservative in the older, institutional sense: the world is complicated, consequences are opaque, and intervention is often a way of proving you exist.

Context matters. Trollope spent years inside the British Post Office, watching how systems actually function and how easily reform becomes self-display. Victorian Britain was thick with “improvement” energy: expanding suffrage, public health campaigns, Irish policy, imperial management, and an ever-growing administrative state. Against that backdrop, “doing something” reads as both political branding and a kind of moral impatience - the reformer’s impulse to treat society like a problem set.

The quote also anticipates a modern media ecology where politicians are punished for stillness. Trollope’s cynicism isn’t anti-politics; it’s a warning about performative governance: the compulsion to legislate, announce, crack down, launch, reboot - anything but admit that restraint can be the hardest form of competence.