Politics & Power Quote by George Wald

A scientist doesn’t arrive at a line like this by romanticizing politics; he arrives by reducing it to first principles. “The only point of government” is a scalpel cut through the usual justifications - tradition, glory, ideology, “national greatness” - and it deliberately strips the state of any mystical purpose. Wald frames government as a tool, not a destiny. If it doesn’t protect life and help it flourish, it’s not merely failing; it’s illegitimate.

The pairing of “safeguard” and “foster” is the tell. Safeguarding is the baseline: prevent violence, starvation, preventable disease, environmental poisoning. Fostering is the more expansive claim: life isn’t just survival, it’s the conditions that make survival worth having - public health, education, clean air, a social floor that keeps people from falling through. Wald’s language quietly rejects the idea that government’s job is to police morality or enforce hierarchy. It also rejects the libertarian move of treating the state as an inherent intruder; the state is judged by outcomes, not by its size.

Context matters: Wald lived through world war, the atomic age, and the Cold War, when “security” often became a euphemism for militarization and secrecy. As a life scientist, he’s insisting on a different metric for public power: not GDP, not dominance, not abstract “freedom,” but whether human bodies and futures are actually protected. It’s a moral argument wearing lab-coat clarity, and that’s why it lands.