Politics & Power Quote by Douglas Adams

Adams takes a familiar civic anxiety - that ambition and competence rarely share a zip code - and turns it into a joke with teeth. The line’s engine is mock-authoritative certainty: “well-known fact,” plus the self-satisfied Latin of “ipso facto,” as if political psychology can be settled like a footnote. That performative seriousness is the trap. He borrows the tone of institutional wisdom to expose how often institutions reward the wrong traits.

The subtext isn’t “all leaders are bad.” It’s that the desire to rule is frequently a proxy for cravings democracies are supposed to filter out: ego, dominance, the thrill of control, the belief you’re uniquely necessary. By contrast, the people most “suited” to power may be the ones least interested in it - not saints, just adults with a working sense of limits. The second sentence sharpens the cynicism into a paradox: the very skills required to win the presidency (self-promotion, coalition-building, strategic charm, disciplined ambition) may correlate with a willingness to bend reality, reduce complexity to slogans, and treat the public as an audience.

Context matters: Adams wrote from a late-20th-century Britain steeped in bureaucratic absurdity and media-managed politics, and his broader Hitchhiker’s sensibility treats systems as comic machines that run on misplaced confidence. The rhetoric lands because it flatters the reader’s suspicion while refusing solemnity; it’s laughter as political critique. Beneath the punchline is a bleak institutional question: if our selection mechanisms consistently elevate the power-seeking, the problem isn’t merely individual character - it’s design.