"Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak"
About this Quote
Power doesn’t just rule; it narrates. Adams’s line skewers the self-mythology that comes packaged with authority: the conviction that power is not merely necessary, but noble. “Great soul” is the tell. He’s mocking the way leaders moralize their own dominance, dressing ambition up as virtue so it can pass inspection in public. “Vast views” widens the scam: if the plan feels cruel or opaque, that’s not a flaw in the plan, it’s your smallness. The weak “can’t comprehend.” A tidy rhetorical shield.
The intent is diagnostic as much as accusatory. Adams isn’t describing a few bad actors; he’s describing a habit of power, a psychological reflex. When you sit high enough, dissent stops sounding like critique and starts sounding like ignorance. That shift turns accountability into an insult. It also recasts democratic skepticism as a kind of incompetence, which is how republics drift into permission structures for elites.
Context matters because Adams is a founder who knew the temptations from the inside. He helped build a government designed to distrust concentrated power, yet lived through the early republic’s partisan trench warfare, fears of mob rule, and the anxious project of proving the new experiment could survive. His own presidency, shadowed by the Alien and Sedition Acts, gives the quote an edge: it reads like a warning that can boomerang back onto the speaker.
The subtext is brutal: power’s favorite argument is not that it’s right, but that it’s too elevated to be judged. Adams is telling you to hear that argument for what it is - not wisdom, but insulation.
The intent is diagnostic as much as accusatory. Adams isn’t describing a few bad actors; he’s describing a habit of power, a psychological reflex. When you sit high enough, dissent stops sounding like critique and starts sounding like ignorance. That shift turns accountability into an insult. It also recasts democratic skepticism as a kind of incompetence, which is how republics drift into permission structures for elites.
Context matters because Adams is a founder who knew the temptations from the inside. He helped build a government designed to distrust concentrated power, yet lived through the early republic’s partisan trench warfare, fears of mob rule, and the anxious project of proving the new experiment could survive. His own presidency, shadowed by the Alien and Sedition Acts, gives the quote an edge: it reads like a warning that can boomerang back onto the speaker.
The subtext is brutal: power’s favorite argument is not that it’s right, but that it’s too elevated to be judged. Adams is telling you to hear that argument for what it is - not wisdom, but insulation.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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