Politics & Power Quote by Benjamin Disraeli

Disraeli isn’t describing politics; he’s stripping it for parts. The line lands with the cold snap of a man who’s watched the machine from inside and decided the romantic vocabulary of public life is mostly camouflage. “No act of treachery or meanness” is sweeping on purpose: not a complaint about one scandal or one rival, but an indictment of parties as organisms whose prime directive is survival. By aiming at “a political party” rather than “politicians,” he widens the target from individual vice to institutional logic. Parties, in this view, don’t merely permit dishonour; they metabolize it.

The second clause does the real damage. “For in politics there is no honour” is less moral philosophy than a verdict on incentives. Honour is personal, slow, reputation-bound; politics is collective, fast, and transactional. Once action is filtered through caucuses, whips, and electoral arithmetic, virtues that make sense in private life become liabilities. Disraeli’s phrasing implies that even decent people, once yoked to a party, can be made complicit in “meanness” for the higher cause of coherence, message discipline, or victory.

Context matters: Disraeli rose through Britain’s turbulent party realignments, a period when “principle” was often rebranded as strategy and yesterday’s enemies became tomorrow’s coalition partners. The quote reads like preemptive realism from a master tactician: if you expect honour, you’ll be easy to manipulate; if you assume the worst, you’ll at least negotiate with your eyes open. It’s a warning, but also a permission slip for ruthlessness dressed as clarity.