Life & Wisdom Quote by Isabel Allende

Allende’s line lands like a moral diagnosis: the scariest thing isn’t power itself, but power that no longer has to answer to anyone. “Impunity” is the key word - clinical, legalistic, cold. It evokes courtrooms where nothing happens, officials who resign into consulting gigs, generals who retire into comfort. The fear isn’t melodrama; it’s structural. She’s naming the moment when authority detaches from consequence and becomes a self-licking machine.

The sentence’s repetition is doing quiet work. “Power with impunity” describes a condition; “abuse of power” names the obvious outcome; “the power to abuse” pushes deeper, suggesting a system designed to make abuse easy, normal, even invisible. It’s not only about bad people in high places. It’s about architectures - institutions, laws, traditions, gender roles, class protections - that grant permission. Allende’s phrasing implies that abuse isn’t an accident of power; it’s one of its most reliable products when oversight collapses.

Context matters: Allende is a writer formed by Chile’s political trauma, by exile, by watching state power turn intimate life into collateral damage. Her novels often track how patriarchy and dictatorship rhyme: both rely on silence, fear, and the belief that some lives don’t count. That’s the subtext here too. She’s warning that tyranny doesn’t always announce itself with tanks; it can arrive as an entitlement, a shrug, a closed door, a system confident it will never be punished.