Leadership Quote by Peter Schuyler

A line like this doesn’t try to reform the system; it tries to puncture the audience’s last illusion that the system ever wanted reform. Peter Schuyler isn’t offering a scandalous revelation so much as a cold reassurance to the already-cynical: relax, this is the baseline. The bite is in the shrugging cadence. “Always” and “nothing new” flatten outrage into continuity, turning corruption from an emergency into a tradition. That rhetorical move matters because it quietly shifts the burden of proof. If politicians are “for sale” by default, then the moral drama moves away from individual wrongdoing and toward a marketplace logic everyone is presumed to accept.

Schuyler’s context helps explain the bluntness. In colonial New York, politics was braided tightly with land, trade, patronage, and personal networks. Offices were not just public trusts; they were levers in a contest among families, factions, and imperial interests. A figure like Schuyler, positioned inside those networks, could recognize that “sale” wasn’t only bribery in a modern, cash-in-envelope sense. It was the everyday exchange of favors, contracts, influence, and allegiance in a frontier economy where governance often ran on personal credit.

The subtext is both accusatory and protective. By declaring venality a constant, he indicts rivals while insulating the whole class (including himself) from exceptional blame. If everyone is compromised, no one is uniquely guilty. That’s why the line still lands today: it’s not a diagnosis meant to heal, but a worldview meant to anesthetize.