Life's Pleasures Quote by Charles Caleb Colton

Power, in Colton's formulation, is less a tool than a solvent: it dissolves judgment the way wine dissolves inhibition. The line works because it refuses the comforting myth that corruption is a personality flaw belonging to villains. Intoxication targets "the best hearts" and "the strongest heads" first, the very people we are most tempted to trust. Colton’s cynicism is surgical: virtue and intelligence are not antidotes to authority; they are often the credentials that get authority past the guards.

The analogy to wine is doing quiet political work. Wine doesn’t turn you into someone else; it exaggerates what’s already there, lowers friction, makes impulses feel justified. Unlimited power, Colton implies, doesn’t manufacture evil so much as it removes consequences, and consequence is where morality usually lives. That’s the subtext: most ethics are environmental. Change the environment - make praise constant, dissent costly, and accountability optional - and even decency becomes pliable.

Context matters. Writing in an era still processing the aftershocks of revolution and empire, Colton is speaking to a public newly obsessed with constitutions, checks, and the problem of the "great man". His absolutism ("No man") is a rhetorical lockdown, meant to end the debate before it drifts into exceptions for the charismatic, the enlightened, the "temporary" emergency leader.

It’s a warning disguised as realism: institutions should be built on the expectation of human weakness, not on the hope of human excellence.