Politics & Power Quote by Lydia M. Child

Child’s move here is to flip the moral furniture and make the reader notice what we’ve been sitting on. In popular storytelling, Jesus is rarely framed as “brave” or “clever” in the muscular, strategic sense; his authority is rendered as holiness, patience, suffering. The devil, meanwhile, gets the attributes we secretly admire in public life: sharp intelligence, tactical skill, fearlessness. Child isn’t praising Satanic charisma. She’s diagnosing a cultural tell: we moralize virtue, but we romanticize power.

The sentence works because it weaponizes asymmetry. “None speak…” sets up an absence that feels almost scandalous, then she piles on the devil’s résumé in a rhythm that mimics political biography. The subtext is pointed for an activist steeped in antebellum reform: societies that reward domination will inevitably imagine evil as competent and compelling. If courage is coded as aggression and intellect as manipulation, goodness gets feminized into softness and passivity while villainy inherits the glamorous tools of statecraft. That’s not theology; it’s cultural psychology with a reformer’s edge.

Child also hints at why cruelty survives respectability. We tend to believe that change requires ruthlessness, that winning demands “cunning,” so we smuggle admiration for those traits into our myths by assigning them to the villain. Her final phrase, “reveal much,” is a quiet threat: if our instincts keep crowning darkness with the qualities we prize, the problem isn’t the devil we imagine. It’s the world we’ve built to need him.