Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.

The line satirizes politics as a self-perpetuating cycle of alarm and mismanagement. “Looking for trouble” suggests politicians and institutions are incentivized to hunt for crises to justify attention, power, or policy. “Finding it everywhere” implies a worldview that treats ordinary complexity as emergency. The sting comes in the last clauses: even when problems are real, political actors may misread causes (“diagnosing it incorrectly”) and then compound harm through ill-suited solutions (“applying the wrong remedies”). The quote’s medical metaphor frames governance as a kind of malpractice—an indictment of opportunism, ideological tunnel vision, and the gap between rhetoric and effective administration.