Politics & Power Quote by Jean Anouilh

"Nothing is irreparable in politics" lands like a shrug delivered with a scalpel. Anouilh, the playwright who made careers out of moral collisions and compromised purity, isn’t offering optimism here so much as a diagnosis: politics is the one arena where the category of the unforgivable rarely sticks. Not because societies are uniquely merciful, but because power has its own laundering cycle. Today’s scandal is tomorrow’s “complicated chapter,” rebranded by necessity, fatigue, or a new enemy.

The line works because it flips a comforting assumption. In private life, some damage stays damaged: a betrayal, a humiliation, a broken trust. Politics pretends to be public ethics, but it often runs on public amnesia. “Irreparable” implies a moral finality, a point beyond return. Anouilh denies that finality, hinting at a system where reversals are not just possible but routine. Apologies can be scripted, enemies can be rehabilitated, coalitions can swallow their own vows. The machinery keeps moving because too many people need it to.

Context matters: Anouilh wrote in the long shadow of France’s wartime collaboration and postwar reckoning, when reputations were simultaneously destroyed and mysteriously restored, when “national unity” could serve as both healing and cover. The subtext is a cynical realism: politics is less a court of truth than a stage with fast set changes. Nothing is irreparable because nothing is ever fully resolved; it’s merely recast. That’s not a comforting thought. It’s a warning about how easily “we moved on” becomes policy.