Art & Creativity Quote by Ross Perot

Perot is doing something sly here: he flatters writers while quietly demoting them. The opening claim, "Action is greater than writing", reads like a businessman’s corrective to a culture that over-rewards commentary. It’s an argument against prestige-by-prose, the kind of respectability that comes from sounding smart rather than building, fixing, or risking anything. Then he tightens the screw: a "good man" is a better object of contemplation than a "great author". That isn’t anti-intellectualism so much as an attempt to reset the moral scoreboard. Talent is optional; character isn’t.

The most revealing move is the pivot from hierarchy to bargain: only two things are worth living for - do what deserves to be written, and write what deserves to be read. Perot doesn’t reject writing; he drafts it into service. Writing becomes a test of accountability: if your actions can’t survive narrative scrutiny, they probably weren’t worth much. And if your writing can’t survive readership, it’s just private vanity dressed up as insight. The subtext is extremely Perot: results matter, and so does the audit trail.

Context matters too. Coming from a late-20th-century tycoon who made a national persona out of competence, patriotism, and managerial certainty, this sounds like a rebuke to elites who mistake articulation for authority. It’s also self-justification. Perot wanted to be seen as the rare figure who could both act (business, politics) and narrate action into meaning. The quote is a moral resume: do the work, then earn the story.