Politics & Power Quote by Molly Ivins

That line lands with the weary snap of someone who’s watched “staying out of it” masquerade as a moral stance. Molly Ivins wasn’t warning that politics is interesting; she was insisting it’s inescapable, the way gravity is inescapable. The genius is the second clause: “no matter how much you’d like to.” It concedes the audience’s impulse to tune out - the fatigue, the cynicism, the sense that the whole system is a rigged carnival - and then denies it as a viable option. She’s not scolding from a pedestal; she’s speaking from the same barstool, then sliding the bill across the counter.

Intent-wise, Ivins is defending political attention as a form of self-defense. Her career, especially in Texas’s conservative machine politics and the national rightward turn of the late 20th century, trained her to treat apathy as a luxury enjoyed by people least likely to be harmed. The subtext: you can ignore politics, but politics won’t ignore you. Decisions about wages, schools, policing, reproductive rights, war - they arrive in your life whether you RSVP or not.

It also contains a sly jab at performative neutrality. “I’m not political” becomes, in Ivins’s framing, a confession of comfort or denial, not enlightenment. She uses plainspoken inevitability to puncture the fantasy that private life is separate from public power - a particularly American fantasy, and a particularly profitable one for those already holding the levers.