Politics & Power Quote by Anthony de Mello

De Mello builds his warning like a string of detonators: each phrase pairs a celebrated human enterprise with the one quality that keeps it from turning predatory. The trick is in the grammar. “Without” does the heavy lifting, making absence - not evil, not temptation, not even ignorance - the real antagonist. It’s an indictment of modern life’s favorite habit: treating tools as virtues.

The list reads like a spiritual audit of late-20th-century optimism, when “progress” and “learning” were increasingly framed as self-justifying goods. De Mello refuses that comfort. “Politics without principle” isn’t just corruption; it’s politics emptied of moral orientation, a machine that can run efficiently in any direction. “Wealth without work” takes aim at entitlement and extraction, the sense that value can be conjured without contribution. Even “learning without silence” lands with special force: it’s not anti-intellectual, it’s anti-noise. Knowledge that never meets reflection becomes performance, trivia, weaponry.

His Catholic-inflected spirituality shows in the last pairings, but he’s not preaching piety for its own sake. “Religion without fearlessness” flips the stereotype: faith isn’t meant to produce timidity or rule-following, but courage - the nerve to be truthful, to change, to confront injustice. “Worship without awareness” is the final cut, aimed at ritual as anesthesia. The subtext is ruthless: civilization doesn’t collapse only from villains; it collapses from institutions kept alive after their animating conscience has been removed.