Leadership Quote by James A. Garfield

Bravery, Garfield suggests, isn’t the cinematic charge into gunfire; it’s the quieter, costlier act of naming what everyone else has agreed to euphemize. The line turns courage into a confrontation with moral reality: not merely facing “the Devil” (danger, temptation, power) but refusing to grant it the polite disguises that let it operate unchallenged. The sting is in the second clause - “and tell him he is a Devil” - which shifts the scene from endurance to indictment. Plenty of people can withstand fear. Fewer can risk the social consequences of calling evil by its proper name, especially when evil is dressed up as respectability, tradition, or necessity.

As a president in the post-Civil War United States, Garfield inhabited a political culture thick with corruption, patronage, and factional bargaining. That makes the quote read less like a sermon and more like a governing philosophy aimed at the machinery of power itself. “The Devil” here can be literal sin, but it’s also any institution that demands complicity: party bosses, graft, racial backlash, or the transactional ethics of Washington. Garfield frames moral clarity as an act of defiance, not piety.

Rhetorically, the sentence works because it personifies wrongdoing as something that can be met eye-to-eye. It’s intimate, almost prosecutorial. The bravery isn’t abstract; it’s a face, a verdict, and the willingness to endure retaliation for speaking it aloud. In a democracy, that kind of courage is contagious - and dangerous - precisely because it threatens the comfortable bargain that lets everyone pretend they didn’t recognize the Devil when he walked into the room.