Leadership Quote by Kathleen Casey

Anger, in Kathleen Casey's telling, is not the problem. It's the proof of a pulse. By opening with "the noblest breasts", she grants moral people permission to flare up: indignation can be a civic reflex, not a character flaw. That move matters coming from a politician, because public life demands a constant performance of composure; she’s legitimizing outrage while warning against its most corrosive afterlife.

The real target is the "slow droppings of an unforgiving temper" - a phrase that turns emotion into weathering, not fire. Quick anger burns hot and clears; resentment seeps, stains, calcifies. Casey is drawing a bright ethical line between an immediate response to injury and the long, private maintenance of grievance. The syntax reinforces it: anger "may be kindled" (passive, almost accidental), while unforgiving temper actively "never takes the shape" of something coherent. Hatred, she implies, is not strength of feeling but a failure of moral architecture - inconsistent, shapeless, sustained only by repetition.

Subtext: she’s offering a code of conduct for political conflict. Disagreement can be sharp; even anger can be honorable. What cannot be normalized is the slow manufacture of enemies, the habitual refusal to release a slight because it’s useful - for fundraising, for party discipline, for personal identity. In an era where politics often runs on grievance and long-memory tribalism, Casey’s line reads like a warning against converting righteous anger into a permanent fuel source. It’s not a plea for niceness; it’s a demand for emotional hygiene in the public sphere.