Leadership Quote by George Savile

Savile’s line is a neatly cocked pistol aimed at lazy power. The syntax does the work: two parallel clauses, two kinds of pain, one unavoidable bill. If a ruler refuses the “difficulty of understanding” - the slow labor of listening, reading, weighing competing interests - he doesn’t get to remain comfortably ignorant. He simply trades the hard work of cognition for the hard risk of dependence. “Must undergo” lands like a sentence, not a suggestion. Governance has costs; you choose which ones you pay.

The subtext is suspicious of courts, factions, and the professional whisperers who thrive around a prince. “Trusting” here isn’t virtuous faith; it’s outsourcing judgment to advisors with their own incentives. Savile implies that power attracts interpretation: if the prince won’t interpret the world, someone else will interpret it for him. That’s where “danger” lives - not only in being misled, but in becoming governable by flattery, panic, or polished certainty.

Contextually, this is Enlightenment-era pragmatism dressed as moral instruction. Savile, a working politician, isn’t romanticizing the philosopher-king; he’s warning about the administrative reality of empire, finance, and faction. The line reads as a critique of inherited authority that refuses its own responsibilities: birth may grant the crown, but it doesn’t grant comprehension. In a modern key, it’s a warning to any leader - CEO, president, platform owner - who treats complexity as an inconvenience. If you won’t do the hard thinking, you’ll do the hard regretting.