Daily Inspiration Quote by Edward Dahlberg

Dahlberg’s line has the sting of a backhanded compliment: the ancients, he suggests, were at least honest about power. They built politics around its management, its limits, its rituals, its containment. Liberty, by contrast, is slipperier, easier to mythologize than to govern. The sentence works because it refuses the modern comfort story in which history is a march from coercion to freedom. Dahlberg flips it: older societies may have lacked our language of rights, yet they possessed a clearer-eyed technology for dealing with ambition, faction, and the brute fact that someone always rules.

The subtext is a warning about modern liberal self-confidence. “Regulation of liberty” sounds almost like a category error: liberty is treated as a sacred absolute, while power is treated as a regrettable tool. Dahlberg implies that this moral sorting invites naïveté. If you don’t design institutions to handle power openly, power doesn’t disappear; it metastasizes into informal networks, sanctimony, or “necessary” emergencies. The ancients, from Roman constitutional tinkering to Greek suspicion of tyrants, expected corruption and overreach as baseline conditions. Their checks were often harsh, sometimes anti-democratic, but legible.

Context matters: Dahlberg wrote in a century of mass politics, propaganda, and bureaucratic states that claimed to act in the name of freedom while perfecting new methods of control. His novelist’s sensibility shows: he’s less interested in policy than in the psychological trick societies play on themselves. Liberty becomes a banner; power becomes a system. The barb is that modernity waves the banner and forgets the system.