Politics & Power Quote by Evelyn Waugh

Waugh’s joke lands because it’s a tiny act of linguistic vandalism against the British talent for moral self-rebranding. “Force” is blunt, physical, faintly vulgar; it belongs to other people’s empires, other people’s police, other people’s wars. “Might,” by contrast, sounds like history in a top hat: abstract, inevitable, almost metaphysical. By pretending this is a meaningful distinction, Waugh exposes it as the oldest trick in imperial rhetoric - changing the label so the violence reads as destiny.

The line also skewers a peculiarly British strain of hypocrisy: the insistence that power is only power when foreigners use it. When Britons do the same thing, it’s “tradition,” “order,” “stability,” a civilizing impulse. Waugh compresses that entire worldview into one smug adverb: “alone.” It’s not just chauvinism; it’s the comic, brittle certainty of a class trained to hear its own dominance as good taste.

Context matters. Waugh wrote in the long hangover of empire, when Britain’s global supremacy was visibly fraying but the language of supremacy still had immaculate manners. His Catholic conservatism often made him nostalgic about hierarchy, yet his satirical eye delighted in puncturing the sanctimonious diction that props hierarchies up. The intent isn’t to argue policy; it’s to show how nations launder their actions through vocabulary, and how that laundering is itself a kind of force - or, if you prefer, Might.