"My aim was never to seek a force and take power"
About this Quote
The subtext is a familiar autocrat’s alibi: I didn’t take power; power demanded me. That framing matters because Mubarak’s legitimacy was always procedural and brittle. He rose not through a popular mandate but through succession after Sadat’s assassination, then governed for decades under a state of emergency that turned stability into a permanent argument against accountability. When the street finally challenged him in 2011, the regime’s last rhetorical refuge was to recast control as stewardship and repression as restraint.
The quote’s intent, then, isn’t to persuade skeptics so much as to reorganize blame: any harshness becomes an unfortunate response to chaos, any longevity becomes service rather than entrenchment. It’s the language of a man trying to exit history as a caretaker, not as the architect of a system that made “taking power” unnecessary because it was never really up for grabs.
Quote Details
| Topic | Leadership |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Mubarak, Hosni. (2026, January 17). My aim was never to seek a force and take power. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/my-aim-was-never-to-seek-a-force-and-take-power-48882/
Chicago Style
Mubarak, Hosni. "My aim was never to seek a force and take power." FixQuotes. January 17, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/my-aim-was-never-to-seek-a-force-and-take-power-48882/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"My aim was never to seek a force and take power." FixQuotes, 17 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/my-aim-was-never-to-seek-a-force-and-take-power-48882/. Accessed 17 Feb. 2026.










