Success Quote by George Soros

Power, Soros suggests, doesn’t just drift toward arrogance; it drafts a whole moral vocabulary to defend itself. In this quote, he’s not debating a particular policy so much as diagnosing a governing reflex: when leaders treat dissent as disloyalty, they don’t merely win arguments, they shrink the argument-space itself. The “first principle” he invokes borrows directly from Karl Popper’s open-society tradition that Soros has long championed and funded: fallibility isn’t a private weakness, it’s a public design constraint. Institutions are supposed to assume error is possible, then build in correction through criticism, press freedom, and competitive politics.

The line “we may be wrong” does the heavy lifting. It’s a small, almost modest phrase that quietly detonates the moral certainty leaders like to brandish during crisis. Soros frames open society as a discipline of self-doubt, which makes the next move sharper: if disagreement is necessary for course correction, then branding opponents “unpatriotic” isn’t just rude rhetoric, it’s anti-feedback. It turns politics into loyalty testing, a system optimized for solidarity over truth.

Context matters: Soros is a businessman-philanthropist often cast by nationalists as the villain behind “globalist” plots. That backdrop gives his defense of dissent a double edge. He’s arguing for a principle while also countering the very smear he’s describing: opposition to policy is not treason, and the health of a country can be measured by whether it still permits that distinction to stand.