Leadership Quote by George William Norris

A politician rarely tells his own side to put down its weapons unless he’s trying to drain the romance out of power. Norris’s line turns on that small, priggish phrase: “we ought to.” It’s not a plea for purity; it’s a wager that the real test of strength is restraint. “Follow the example” suggests a reciprocal gesture - someone else has stepped back first, and the moral burden now shifts to the listener. The sentence is engineered to make refusal sound childish, like insisting on keeping a club after the other guy has opened his hands.

The subtext is suspicion of the permanent emergency. Disarmament here isn’t only about rifles or battleships; it’s about the habits a nation acquires when it keeps arming itself: inflated threats, righteous spending, leaders rewarded for belligerence, dissent cast as disloyalty. Norris, a famously independent Republican and a prominent critic of war profiteering and intervention, spoke from an era when “preparedness” was sold as common sense and often functioned as policy’s emotional blank check. His career-long theme was that militarization doesn’t merely respond to danger - it manufactures a politics that needs danger.

The line’s quiet audacity is that it treats peace as an action, not a mood. “When it is done” implies a completed task, a chance to reset. Norris is asking for a public willing to risk looking naive in order to avoid becoming predictably armed, predictably fearful, and therefore predictably governable.