Leadership Quote by Kitty O'Neill Collins

“Business is more exciting than any game” reads like a deliberate provocation from someone who understands how public life actually runs: not on ideals alone, but on leverage, timing, and winners who can count. Coming from Kitty O’Neill Collins, a politician, the line isn’t praising commerce so much as reframing politics itself as the highest-stakes arena. Games are bounded: a clock, a field, a rulebook everyone agrees to. Business, by contrast, is an open system where the rules are constantly negotiated, where the scoreboard is money, influence, access, and survivability. That’s the thrill she’s pointing to.

The subtext is almost combative. It’s a corrective to the romantic idea that “real life” is elsewhere and politics is just rhetoric. Collins suggests the opposite: the adrenaline of business is the adrenaline of consequential decision-making. She’s also quietly defending ambition. In a culture that often expects women in power to perform selflessness, calling business “exciting” is a way of claiming appetite and competence without apology. Excitement here isn’t childish fun; it’s the electric feeling of being inside the machinery.

Context matters: mid-century American politics increasingly blurred with corporate power, fundraising, and media management. Collins’ quote can be read as frank realism about that convergence. It flatters the builders and dealmakers in her coalition, while reminding skeptics that the “game” metaphor is too small for forces that set wages, shape cities, and decide which communities get investment and which get left behind.