Politics & Power Quote by Paul Harris

“Permanent superiority” is the kind of phrase that flatters empires into thinking their winning streak is a birthright. Harris punctures it with a lawyer’s cold realism: history is not a trophy case, it’s a docket of precedents. The line works because it borrows the authority of inevitability. Not “might,” not “could,” but “has never been realized.” He’s arguing like someone laying out evidence for a jury, inviting the reader to supply Rome, Spain, Napoleon, Britain - whatever example best undermines their current complacency.

The second sentence, “After the rise comes the fall,” is deliberately blunt, almost proverbial. That simplicity is the point. It’s not a nuanced lecture about trade routes or institutional decay; it’s a moral warning disguised as a historical pattern. The subtext is aimed at audiences who confuse dominance with destiny: if you’re on top, you are already in the most dangerous psychological position, because you’ll start treating criticism as disloyalty and risk as an insult.

Context matters. Harris lived through U.S. industrial expansion, World War I, and the early tremors of a new American century. In that era, “superiority” wasn’t just military; it was racial, economic, and civilizational language circulating in polite society. His caution reads like an attempt to drain that word of its triumphalism. He’s not predicting collapse for sport; he’s trying to make arrogance look intellectually indefensible - and therefore politically unaffordable.