Politics & Power Quote by Thomas Edison

Courage, here, is less a virtue than a business strategy - a way to keep the gears turning when fear would otherwise shut the factory down. Edison isn’t offering comfort so much as issuing a work order: don’t retreat, don’t hoard, don’t freeze. In a single breath he yokes emotional resilience to national destiny, turning private anxiety into a public duty.

The line works because it borrows the cadence of patriotic sermonizing while speaking in the plain, managerial language of an inventor who has lived through boom-bust cycles. “I have seen many depressions in business” is a credential, not a confession. It’s Edison positioning himself as the seasoned operator who understands that downturns are part of the machine. The implied subtext: panic is the real enemy, and the antidote is forward motion - keep investing, keep building, keep tinkering.

His faith is not particularly religious; it’s industrial. “Always America has emerged… stronger and more prosperous” frames crisis as a kind of national R&D process: failure as iteration, hardship as the precondition for improvement. That’s reassuring, but also coercive, because it narrows the acceptable response. If the story of America is inevitable recovery, then doubt becomes unpatriotic and caution looks like cowardice.

The invocation of “your fathers” presses the audience into inherited obligation, a generational relay race where quitting is betrayal. Coming from a figure synonymous with invention and productivity, the message doubles as cultural propaganda for capitalism’s preferred emotion in a crash: not anger, not grief, but brave, disciplined optimism - the kind that keeps people buying the future.