Politics & Power Quote by Corazon Aquino

Aquino’s line is a rebuttal dressed as a concession, and that structure is the whole weapon. She begins by granting the technocrat’s sneer at idealism: freedoms don’t fill stomachs, ballots don’t generate electricity. It’s the argument authoritarian regimes have always loved to peddle in moments of scarcity: trade rights for “results,” accept strongman rule as the price of modern life. By saying “It is true,” she refuses the easy straw man that democracy is magically self-sufficient. She acknowledges hunger and infrastructure as real, not rhetorical.

Then she flips the ledger with a single image: the political prisoner in a dark cell. Suddenly “development” isn’t a GDP chart; it’s a lived moral deficit. The subtext is devastatingly practical: dictatorship doesn’t even deliver on its own promise. If power and machinery are the bragging rights of authoritarian order, why is the most basic switch denied to the people it cages? The light becomes a double symbol - literal electricity and moral illumination - and the cell exposes the regime’s core product: control.

Coming from Corazon Aquino, the country’s post-Marcos democratic figurehead, the context sharpens. She’s speaking from a Philippines that had been sold “discipline” and “progress” while opponents disappeared. The intent isn’t to romanticize democracy; it’s to insist that any politics claiming to be “realistic” must account for the costs it hides. Her punchline is that rights are not dessert after development. In a dictatorship, even the promises are rationed.