Politics & Power Quote by Franklin P. Adams

Adams takes a folk comfort phrase - you can fool some of the people some of the time - and flips it into an indictment of professional power. The punchline isn’t that the public is uniquely gullible; it’s that politicians have been rewarded for treating gullibility as a renewable resource. “Conviction based on experience” is the blade. It implies a long trail of campaigns, speeches, and scandals where the lesson learned wasn’t humility but efficiency: deception works, so refine it.

The line also smuggles in a bleak portrait of democratic memory. Politicians don’t believe they can fool everyone because they’re delusional; they believe it because the electorate’s attention is fragmented, outrage is short-lived, and consequences are often delayed or outsourced. Adams is describing a system that trains its operators to confuse messaging with truth and survival with virtue. If you can keep enough people misinformed long enough, you effectively fool “all of the people all of the time” in the only way that matters: at the ballot box, in the budget, in the news cycle.

As a journalist in the early 20th century - an era of machine politics, mass advertising, and the rise of PR as a political tool - Adams would have watched persuasion industrialize. His cynicism lands because it’s not abstract moralizing; it’s observational comedy with a paper trail. The “trouble” isn’t a single liar on a podium. It’s a political class that has turned misdirection into a tested strategy, and a public sphere that keeps validating the experiment.