Politics & Power Quote by Anthony Trollope

Trollope lands the blade with the calm assurance of someone describing the weather: not a scandal, not a lapse, but a "doctrine". That word matters. He isn’t accusing politicians of occasionally lying; he’s diagnosing a worldview in which dishonesty becomes a principle, taught and repeated until it feels like common sense. The contempt is sharpened by the bureaucratic phrasing "a large clan of politicians" - clan suggests tribal loyalty over public duty, a closed circle that rewards its own and treats the electorate as an external problem to manage.

The sentence is built like a cynical sales pitch. Political honesty is framed in the language of workplace inefficiency: "unnecessary, slow", a drag on productivity. Trollope is catching a modern impulse before it had its current vocabulary - the idea that integrity is a luxury item and "results" are the real moral category. The kicker is "subversive of a man's interests": honesty isn’t merely impractical, it’s actively dangerous to careerists. He exposes the hidden bargain of public life: tell the truth and you lose the inside track.

Then comes the euphemism that makes the whole thing sting: "quick onward movement". It sounds like progress, reform, history marching forward. Trollope hints at how easily momentum can be weaponized, how "movement" becomes an alibi for cutting ethical corners. Written in an era of expanding suffrage, party machinery, and mass persuasion, the line reads like Victorian realism turning its gaze on politics as another marketplace - where the commodity is trust, and the most profitable strategy is to counterfeit it.