"Stupid people who gain power are never stupid about threats to their power."

"[Voltaire] so much enjoyed vexing stupid powerful people that he kept forgetting that stupid people who had gained power were never stupid about threats to their power.
Each time he poked the silly tiger and the tiger clawed back, he was genuinely shocked."
--Adam Gopnik, "Voltaire's Garden: The philosopher as a campaigner for human rights," New Yorker, March 7, 2005

The setting of the quote:

"It was at this moment of delight and apparent retreat, of affable manners and simple living, that [Voltaire] began the series of crusades that eventually blossomed into the human-rights campaigns that came to dominate the rest of his life.
It would be nice to say that Voltaire was a courageous man whom no amount of comfort could seduce. The truth is that, as his friend Condorcet wrote sadly, he was easily terrified, and often a coward:
'He was often seen to expose himself to the storm, almost with temerity, but seldom to stand up to it with firmness.' And, of course, no man of fewer sublime feelings has ever lived; he was baffled by religion and spirituality, materialist and carnal to the core.

"What motivated him, then, to start up?
Partly it must have been that he so much enjoyed vexing stupid powerful people that he kept forgetting that stupid people who had gained power were never stupid about threats to their power. Each time he poked the silly tiger and the tiger clawed back, he was genuinely shocked.

"And then there is a kind of egotism so vast and so pleased with itself that it includes other people as an extension of itself. Voltaire felt so much for other people because he felt so much for himself; everything happened to him because he was the only reasonable subject of everything that happened. By inflating his ego to immense proportions, he made it a shelter for the helpless."