Leadership Quote by Calvin Coolidge

Coolidge’s line is spare enough to sound like common sense, which is exactly how it does its political work. “Civilization” is doing the heavy lifting: it’s a halo word, implying order, progress, and moral legitimacy. Pairing it with “profit” doesn’t just defend capitalism; it baptizes it. If civilization and profit are inseparable, then resisting profit-seeking starts to look not merely misguided but anti-civilizational.

The subtext is a quiet rebuttal to the era’s anxieties. Coolidge governed in the 1920s, when mass production, consumer credit, and corporate consolidation were accelerating, and when labor unrest and Progressive-era critiques still lingered. Instead of treating capitalism as a system with tradeoffs, he frames it as the engine of modern life itself. The formulation also shrinks the role of government: if profit naturally produces “civilization,” then regulation becomes suspect, even paternalistic. Let business run, and society will rise.

What makes the line rhetorically effective is its compression. It refuses to entertain the possibility that profit can be predatory, destabilizing, or culturally corrosive. The claim is not empirical; it’s aspirational, a worldview presented as destiny. Coolidge isn’t arguing for specific policies so much as setting the moral default: growth equals goodness, the market equals modernity.

It’s also a revealing artifact of a pre-Depression confidence. Read after 1929, the sentence gains an unintended edge: a reminder that “civilization” can be fragile precisely when profit is treated as its synonym.