Politics & Power Quote by Ambrose Bierce

Bierce lands this like a courtroom exhibit: not a theory, a “slightest acquaintance.” The phrase is bait. He flatters the reader’s intelligence while insulting anyone who disagrees as historically illiterate. That’s classic Biercean technique - moral judgment smuggled in under the costume of plain observation, delivered with a dry, prosecutorial chill.

The target is the comforting civic myth that republics are inherently more peaceful or principled than monarchies and empires. Bierce doesn’t bother arguing against that myth; he treats it as already refuted by the record. “Powerful” does the real work here. He’s not condemning republicanism as an ideal so much as diagnosing what happens when any state accumulates enough wealth, industry, and self-belief to project force. Republics, in his telling, don’t transcend the ugly incentives of power; they rationalize them. War becomes a public enterprise with popular buy-in, wrapped in the language of liberation, security, or destiny. “Unscrupulous” isn’t just about atrocities; it’s about the elasticity of principle when national interest is on the line.

Context sharpens the bite. Bierce was a Civil War veteran turned journalist who watched the U.S. professionalize its might and moralize its expansion. By the late 19th century, America’s republican self-image traveled alongside imperial behavior, culminating in the Spanish-American War era. Bierce’s cynicism reads less like contrarianism than a warning: democracy doesn’t cancel conquest; it can industrialize it, then call it virtue.