Politics & Power Quote by Ambrose Bierce

Bierce’s genius here is that he drains “revolution” of its perfume and leaves the stink of bureaucracy. The dictionary format pretends to be neutral, but it’s a trap: by treating a sacred civic word like a cold entry, he turns political romance into administrative churn. “Abrupt change” is the only nod to drama; the punchline is “misgovernment,” a term that refuses the comforting fiction that the opposite of tyranny is virtue. For Bierce, the system doesn’t flip from bad to good. It just swaps uniforms.

The intent isn’t merely to mock revolutionaries; it’s to indict the entire political theater that sells moral renewal while reproducing the same incentives: power, patronage, coercion, self-justifying rhetoric. “Form” does a lot of work. It implies cosmetic transformation - new slogans, new committees, new flags - while the underlying relationship between rulers and ruled remains stubbornly intact. Revolutions promise emancipation; Bierce suggests they often deliver a rebranded set of managers.

Context matters: Bierce wrote in the long American aftermath of the Civil War, amid the corruption of the Gilded Age and the era’s boom in mass persuasion. His cynicism is earned, not fashionable. As a journalist and satirist, he’s watching language become a tool of governance itself: when words like “revolution” become prestige tokens, they can be used to launder opportunism. The wit lands because it’s structurally unfair - a single clause that collapses centuries of heroic narrative into a bureaucratic shrug.