Politics & Power Quote by Daniel Keys Moran

A sly little needle of a sentence, Moran’s line pretends to reassure you while actually admitting how far public trust has collapsed. “Believe it or not” is the tell: it frames “good politicians” as an urban legend, something you’d only accept with a raised eyebrow and a defensive laugh. The structure is doing double duty - part lament, part provocation - and it works because it sounds like ordinary speech, the kind of aside you mutter after watching another scandal cycle or “both sides” screaming match.

The specific intent isn’t to praise politics; it’s to challenge the reflexive cynicism that passes for sophistication. Moran, writing from the vantage point of a genre novelist, taps a classic science-fiction instinct: imagine systems, then imagine the people inside them who still try. The quote pushes back against the easy narrative that politics is inherently dirty and that anyone who participates must be compromised. It’s not naive; it’s pointedly aware of the prevailing assumption, which is why the parenthetical tone matters.

Subtext: if you can’t even entertain the possibility of “good politicians,” you’ve already surrendered. That surrender has consequences. It lets corruption hide behind inevitability, rewards performative outrage over patient governance, and turns civic life into a consumer choice: you “hate politics” the way you hate ads, as if opting out doesn’t change the outcome.

The context here is less a specific election than a cultural mood - late-20th-century and ongoing - where irony became armor. Moran’s line asks you to put the armor down, just long enough to remember that institutions are staffed by humans, and contempt is not a substitute for judgment.