"Power confuses itself with virtue and tends also to take itself for omnipotence"
About this Quote
Power rarely advertises itself as power. Fulbright’s line catches the more flattering disguise it prefers: morality. When a government (or any institution) can make decisions stick, it starts to mistake compliance for consent and success for righteousness. That’s the quote’s first move: “confuses itself with virtue” isn’t about a few bad actors; it’s about a structural hallucination. The stronger the leverage, the easier it becomes to narrate outcomes as proof of ethical superiority. If you can intervene, you must be right to intervene. If you can win, you must deserve to win.
The second clause sharpens the indictment. “Tends also to take itself for omnipotence” names the sliding from capability into destiny. Power stops reading limits as real and begins treating them as temporary inconveniences: geography, culture, history, backlash. It’s an especially American pathology in the Cold War era, when Fulbright, a senator who helped design the postwar international order, became one of the most prominent critics of Vietnam and what he called “the arrogance of power.” He watched a nation that thought of itself as a force for good stumble into the belief that it could remake other societies on command.
Fulbright’s intent is less scolding than diagnostic. He’s warning that the corruption of power isn’t just greed; it’s self-adoration. Once authority is convinced it equals virtue, dissent becomes not merely opposition but heresy. Once it believes it’s omnipotent, failure can’t be a lesson - it has to be someone else’s sabotage. The line works because it compresses an entire tragic arc into two verbs: confuses, takes.
The second clause sharpens the indictment. “Tends also to take itself for omnipotence” names the sliding from capability into destiny. Power stops reading limits as real and begins treating them as temporary inconveniences: geography, culture, history, backlash. It’s an especially American pathology in the Cold War era, when Fulbright, a senator who helped design the postwar international order, became one of the most prominent critics of Vietnam and what he called “the arrogance of power.” He watched a nation that thought of itself as a force for good stumble into the belief that it could remake other societies on command.
Fulbright’s intent is less scolding than diagnostic. He’s warning that the corruption of power isn’t just greed; it’s self-adoration. Once authority is convinced it equals virtue, dissent becomes not merely opposition but heresy. Once it believes it’s omnipotent, failure can’t be a lesson - it has to be someone else’s sabotage. The line works because it compresses an entire tragic arc into two verbs: confuses, takes.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
|---|---|
| Source | The Arrogance of Power (1966), J. William Fulbright — book (contains the cited line criticizing U.S. foreign-policy power). |
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