Success Quote by Kenneth Lay

A single sentence that tries to launder blame while sounding like a calm statement of fact. Kenneth Lay’s “But the most important thing is, Enron did not cause the California crisis” opens with “But” to seize control of the frame, as if the messy details have gotten out of hand and only he can restore the proper priorities. “The most important thing” is a classic executive move: it doesn’t argue the evidence so much as declare what counts as evidence. It’s agenda-setting disguised as reassurance.

The phrasing also smuggles in a convenient category error. “Cause” is doing heavy lifting. If you can’t be pinned as the singular origin of a complex breakdown, you can present yourself as basically innocent. That’s a defense built for systems failures, where responsibility is diffuse by design. It’s not “Enron didn’t profit from” or “Enron didn’t manipulate” or “Enron didn’t exploit”; it’s “did not cause,” a standard so absolute it’s almost impossible to meet in either direction.

Context makes the sentence feel less like clarification and more like preemption. During the early-2000s California electricity crisis, public anger searched for villains; Enron, with its trading prowess and later-revealed gaming of markets, was an obvious target. Lay’s intent is to decouple Enron’s actions from people’s lived experience of rolling blackouts and price shocks. The subtext: even if you’re mad, aim your anger elsewhere - regulators, weather, demand, anyone but the traders who figured out how to turn scarcity into strategy. It’s a PR firewall built from one slippery verb.