Politics & Power Quote by Frederick Scott Oliver

A genteel sentence that smuggles in an indictment. Frederick Scott Oliver leads with “It is true” like a man clearing his throat before saying something impolite in a drawing room. The phrasing performs restraint while quietly licensing suspicion: everyone already knows this, he suggests, so we can stop pretending politics is merely private virtue scaled up.

The key move is “in his professional character.” Oliver doesn’t claim the politician is uniquely immoral; he implies the job itself exerts a gravitational pull away from “the most approved pattern of private conduct.” That Victorian-sounding yardstick matters. “Approved” points less to ethics than to social consensus - what respectable people say they value. Politics, then, is framed as a craft in which public performance, coalition maintenance, and strategic half-truths routinely collide with the decorum expected at home.

The hedges (“does not always, or even very often”) are doing double duty. They soften the blow enough to sound fair-minded, but the rhythm also lands like a drumbeat: not always... not even very often. It’s a wry, almost prosecutorial cadence, acknowledging exceptions while making them feel statistically irrelevant.

Contextually, Oliver writes from a British tradition that treated political life as a mix of high principle and grubby management, especially in an era of mass parties and press politics. The subtext is less “politicians are bad” than “stop judging a public operator by private-saint standards, and start judging him by outcomes, constraints, and the temptations the role rewards.”