Daily Inspiration Quote by Lincoln Steffens

Steffens writes like someone who has watched reform slogans curdle in real time. “Power is what men seek” sounds blunt, almost anthropological, but the real bite is in the second clause: “any group that gets it will abuse it.” He isn’t singling out corrupt bosses or a uniquely rotten era; he’s torching the comforting progressive fantasy that the right people, once installed, will purify the machine. The sentence refuses the reader an easy villain. It implicates parties, unions, reform committees, newspapers, even well-meaning civic leagues: power doesn’t just attract the unscrupulous, it distorts the scrupulous.

As a muckraking journalist, Steffens is speaking from the front row of early 20th-century urban politics, where “good government” campaigns often meant swapping one patronage network for another. The phrasing is deliberately spare, almost fatalistic, because fatalism is a tactic here. He’s trying to inoculate the public against naïve hero-worship and the recurring cycle of scandal, purge, and relapse. The word “group” matters: he’s skeptical of collective innocence. Once an organization controls hiring, policing, zoning, budgets, it develops its own self-protective logic. Abuse isn’t only theft; it’s favoritism, retaliation, the quiet bending of rules to keep the wheel turning.

The subtext is not “give up.” It’s harsher: assume corruption is a design problem, not a character flaw. If you want decency, don’t pray for saints; build constraints, transparency, and competition that make abuse harder and accountability unavoidable.