Success Quote by Toni Morrison

Power trains the mind to become an accountant: measure risk, tally loyalties, anticipate backlash. Morrison’s line is a quiet insurgency against that narrowing. “Positions of trust and power” signals the institutional world she spent a career interrogating - schools, publishing, politics, the family itself - places where other people’s lives get handled like paperwork. Trust is the key word. It’s not only authority; it’s custody. You’ve been handed something fragile.

“Dream a little before you think” isn’t anti-intellectual; it’s anti-bureaucratic. Morrison is arguing for sequence. Let the imagination arrive first, before the familiar mental habits of management kick in. Dreaming, here, is moral and aesthetic perception: the ability to picture lives unlike your own, to see consequences that don’t show up on spreadsheets, to remember that humans aren’t problems to solve. Thinking comes next - still necessary, still rigorous - but now anchored to a larger sense of possibility and obligation.

The subtext is a warning about what power does to language and empathy. Institutions reward the “reasonable” answer, the prudent compromise, the efficient solution. Morrison suggests that prudence without vision becomes cruelty with good manners. In the context of her work - where history’s brutal systems often pass themselves off as normal - dreaming is a way to refuse the default settings of the world. It’s a mandate for leaders, editors, teachers, managers: before you optimize, imagine. Before you strategize, remember what a person is.