Success Quote by Robert Foster Bennett

Bennett’s line carries the reassuring thump of mid-to-late-20th-century American political moralizing: the self is healthiest when it governs itself. As a politician, he’s not just offering therapy-adjacent encouragement; he’s arguing for a civic posture. Control becomes a virtue that bridges private life and public ideology, turning “mental health” and “success” into proof points for self-command. That’s strategic. If taking control is “essential,” then dependence, uncertainty, or structural constraint can be reframed as personal failure rather than a political problem.

The phrasing does quiet rhetorical work. “Born in each of us” treats the craving for agency as natural and inevitable, not culturally produced. It universalizes a particular model of personhood: autonomous, self-regulating, always capable of choosing differently. “In charge of our own lives” suggests a clean dashboard with levers labeled attitude, effort, discipline. The subtext is that the world is navigable if you’re properly self-directed, and that the main barrier is internal. That makes for a potent stump-message because it flatters the listener: you already possess what you need.

Contextually, Bennett’s career sits in an era when American politics increasingly fused personal responsibility with public policy arguments. The quote echoes a broader postwar-to-Reagan arc: freedom as self-management, flourishing as individual initiative. It’s an empowering message, but also a narrowing one. By tying mental health to “control,” it risks pathologizing the messy truth of being human: that agency often comes in partial measures, negotiated against institutions, economics, illness, and luck. The brilliance and the danger are the same: it feels like liberation while quietly assigning blame.