Politics & Power Quote by Paul Harris

A lawyer’s mind is always looking for the hidden clause, the unintended consequence, the way a winning argument plants the seed of its own appeal. Paul Harris’s line reads like that kind of sober warning: strengths are not neutral assets; they’re habits. Once a nation builds an identity around a particular advantage, it starts optimizing everything to protect and perform that advantage, even when the world shifts and the advantage turns brittle.

The intent is less doom than diagnosis. “Very strength” implies something celebrated, institutionalized, turned into pride and policy. That’s the subtext: success creates a feedback loop of complacency, overreach, and moral licensing. Military power can harden into militarism; economic dynamism can metastasize into inequality and extraction; tight social cohesion can curdle into xenophobia. The more a nation relies on one muscle, the more it neglects others, and the more it responds to new problems with the old solution, just louder.

Context matters. Harris lived through rapid industrialization, U.S. ascent, World War I, the Great Depression, and the approach of World War II. In that arc, “strength” was increasingly measured in factories, fleets, and financial might - and those same engines produced imperial temptations, speculative bubbles, and mechanized slaughter. Coming from a civic-minded lawyer (and a builder of institutions), the line also reads as a plea for balance: the real patriotism isn’t cheering the nation’s strengths, but stress-testing them, building guardrails, and remembering that what makes you formidable can also make you blind.