Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.

Douglas Adams’s line comes from his satirical science‑fiction universe in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where political authority is routinely portrayed as absurd, accidental, or actively harmful. In that setting, the “President of the Galaxy” is a largely ceremonial distraction while real power operates elsewhere, and Adams uses the office to lampoon modern celebrity politics and the public’s tendency to confuse visibility with competence. The remark reflects Adams’s broader late‑20th‑century skepticism about bureaucracy and leadership: those most eager and adept at winning high office may be precisely those least suited to wield it responsibly.

The quote argues that the skills required to obtain supreme political office—ambition, self‑promotion, coalition‑building, and a taste for power—do not reliably correlate with the virtues needed to govern well (judgment, restraint, and public‑spiritedness). Adams turns this into a paradox: the very fact that someone can successfully maneuver themselves into the presidency is evidence of a dangerous motivation or temperament. As satire, it also targets systems that reward charisma and manipulation over competence, implying that institutional design should limit the influence of those who most desire authority and should resist conflating electoral success with moral or practical fitness to lead.