Politics & Power Quote by Simon Bolivar

Bolivar, the liberator who spent his life assembling republics out of rubble, delivers a warning that reads like self-portraiture. He isn’t romanticizing the ballot; he’s diagnosing a political addiction. Power held too long doesn’t merely corrupt the officeholder in the abstract. It rewires the entire social relationship between ruler and ruled. The line about people growing “accustomed to obeying” is the real blade: tyranny isn’t imposed only by force, it’s normalized through repetition, until obedience feels like order and dissent feels like chaos.

The rhetoric works because it frames democracy as a practice, not a permanent condition. “Repeated elections” aren’t depicted as a quaint ritual but as a pressure-release valve. Bolivar understands post-independence societies as especially vulnerable: institutions are new, loyalties are personal, and the temptation to trade pluralism for “a strong hand” is constant. In that environment, continuity can masquerade as stability while quietly dissolving accountability.

There’s also a hard-earned, almost fatalistic subtext: usurpation is not an aberration, it’s a predictable outcome when citizens and leaders fall into complementary habits. Command becomes a reflex; obedience becomes a comfort. Bolivar’s genius here is refusing to locate tyranny solely in the villainy of one man. He locates it in the slow co-production of authoritarianism, where time itself becomes the accomplice.