Politics & Power Quote by John Adams

Progress, Adams suggests, is selective: physics accumulates proofs, medicine refines techniques, but politics keeps tripping over the same stones. The sting in his line is the implied downgrade of “government” from a science of improvement to a recurring human drama - powered less by discovery than by appetite, vanity, faction, and fear. By invoking “three or four thousand years,” he collapses modernity into ancient history, reminding a young republic that Athens and Rome also thought they were new.

The intent isn’t anti-intellectual; it’s anti-complacent. Adams was steeped in Enlightenment confidence about reason, yet he was also a hard-nosed diagnostician of human nature. The subtext: you can draft clever constitutions, but you can’t engineer virtue. Government “stands still” because its raw materials don’t change. Gravity behaves; voters, demagogues, and ambitious officeholders don’t. That’s why, for Adams, the separation of powers and checks and balances weren’t decorative theory but a kind of political realism: build institutions that assume weakness, not perfection.

Context sharpens the complaint. Writing in an era when Americans were testing whether republican self-rule could survive without sliding into monarchy or mob rule, Adams is warning that the Revolution didn’t repeal history. The line reads as both a rebuke to utopian thinkers and a sober pep talk: if governing won’t steadily “advance” on its own, then the work is maintenance, vigilance, and constraint - less heroic breakthrough than constant repair.