Politics & Power Quote by Samuel Dash

There is a lawyerly candor in Dash admitting the ambition first: he "always wanted to be my own person". The line isn’t a humblebrag about integrity so much as a quiet indictment of what office does to integrity. He frames politics less as public service than as an ecosystem with gravitational pull, where even principled people get bent by party discipline, donors, dealmaking, and the constant need to stay electable. The verb choice matters: he doesn’t fear being persuaded or proven wrong; he fears losing "independence", as if it were a possession that can be surrendered in exchange for a title.

Dash’s profession sharpens the subtext. As a lawyer (and, historically, a major figure in the Watergate era), his currency was credibility: the ability to investigate, argue, and judge without being automatically read as a partisan actor. Running for office would reclassify him instantly. In American political culture, office is supposed to be the arena where beliefs become policy. Dash flips that: beliefs survive best outside the arena, where you can follow facts to uncomfortable conclusions without negotiating them down into slogans.

The quote works because it refuses the usual heroic narrative. It treats independence not as a personality trait but as a structural condition. He’s not confessing a lack of courage; he’s pointing to a system that punishes unbought, unbranded thinking. In that sense, it’s less a personal explanation than a critique of the price of belonging.