Politics & Power Quote by Alice Paul

Alice Paul’s line lands like a clipped warning label on the machinery of democracy: the longer you let someone sit in power, the more the job stops being governing and becomes auditioning. She frames “too many terms” not as a neutral career path but as a moral solvent, something that “corrupts” by narrowing a politician’s imagination to a single, repetitive goal: survival.

The subtext is less about individual bad apples than about incentives. Paul is pointing at the way institutions train behavior. If reelection is the permanent horizon, every decision gets filtered through optics, donors, party gatekeepers, and the latest panic of the news cycle. Courage becomes a luxury; long-term reform becomes a risk. Even good intentions can be remodeled into cautious, poll-tested gestures because the system rewards continuity of office more reliably than it rewards public good.

Context matters: Paul spent her life pressuring a slow, self-protective political order to expand rights, most famously through women’s suffrage and later the Equal Rights Amendment. From that vantage point, “reelected” isn’t a civic metric; it’s the defensive crouch of incumbency against disruptive change. Term limits, in her formulation, aren’t a technocratic tweak. They’re an anti-stagnation tool, a way to keep representatives from turning their seat into a second identity and the electorate into an afterthought.

It’s also a subtle indictment of a culture that confuses experience with entitlement. Paul is arguing that democracy rots when officeholders start mistaking the job for a life sentence.