Life & Wisdom Quote by James Bovard

Bovard’s line lands like a slap precisely because it refuses the comforting fiction that politics is just another customer-service profession. “As a class” is the tell: he’s not accusing a few bad actors, he’s indicting the job description. The danger isn’t merely corruption; it’s incentive. If your career requires acquiring power over strangers, you will learn to speak in public virtue while privately optimizing for control, deference, and permanence. The sentence is built to make that feel obvious, almost tautological: “seeking power over us” becomes the disqualifier, “by definition.” No loopholes for the charming reformer, no redemption arc for the well-branded “public servant.”

The subtext is a hard libertarian anthropology: power warps, and the state is a machine that rewards people most comfortable using coercion. Calling politicians “not... our friends” is a rhetorical downgrade from the lofty to the intimate. Bovard isn’t arguing policy; he’s severing the emotional bond that campaigns cultivate. Friendship implies reciprocity and consent; governance often implies asymmetry and compulsion. He’s asking readers to stop confusing applause lines with alignment, and to treat political affection as a vulnerability.

Contextually, Bovard writes from the post-Watergate, post-Iran-Contra, big-government skepticism tradition, where scandal isn’t an exception but evidence of a system that attracts the wrong temperament. The quote works because it weaponizes plain language to puncture civic romanticism: if someone wants authority over you, assume they are negotiating against your interests, not guarding them.