Life & Wisdom Quote by Margot Asquith

Power rarely has to court the pliable; it has to crack the self-assured. Margot Asquith's line plays against a lazy assumption that "weak" people are the easiest to sway. Her contrarian point is social as much as psychological: in the circles she inhabited - late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain, thick with patronage, reputation, and political choreography - the truly consequential moves were made by men and women who saw themselves as principled. If you could bend a "strong character", you didn't just win an argument; you gained an ally whose very stiffness could be repurposed into force.

The subtext is that weakness is already in motion. The weak character is porous, shifting with moods, incentives, and whoever is nearest. That makes them hard to "influence" in any lasting way because they don't reliably hold a line long enough to steer. Strong characters, by contrast, are legible. They have a story about themselves - duty, honor, consistency, seriousness - and that story becomes the lever. Influence, for Asquith, isn't seduction by flattery so much as strategic framing: present the desired action as the one that preserves their self-image.

There's also a wry, salon-trained realism here. Asquith isn't praising manipulation; she's acknowledging how it works when politics is conducted through conversation, intimacy, and the management of ego. The sharpness of the sentence is its own demonstration: a neat reversal that flatters the reader into thinking they, too, are "strong" - and therefore worth the trouble of being persuaded.