Leadership Quote by William Jennings Bryant

“Destiny” is doing double duty here: it’s a comforting myth and a political weapon. By yanking fate out of the realm of luck and putting it into the realm of decision, William Jennings Bryan (often misattributed as “Bryant”) turns a hazy spiritual idea into a marching order. The sentence isn’t poetry; it’s a stump-speech engine. The repeated “it is” clauses create the cadence of certainty, the kind that plays well in a crowd and leaves little oxygen for doubt. Choice becomes not just available but obligatory.

The subtext is moral pressure. If destiny is choice, then failure starts to look less like misfortune and more like personal (or civic) negligence. That framing flatters agency while quietly narrowing sympathy: it’s easier to demand sacrifice, discipline, and reform when the alternative is cast as passive waiting. Bryan’s populist-era politics leaned on this kind of voluntarist rhetoric. At the turn of the century, Americans were living through industrial upheaval, rising inequality, and fierce fights over monetary policy and the power of corporations. “Matter of choice” is an implicit rebuke to people who feel trapped by systems: you’re not trapped; you’re undecided.

It also works as a bridge between individual self-help and collective action. Bryan can be read as telling the worker, the farmer, the voter: history won’t rescue you, and neither will elites. Achieved destiny sounds personal, but it smuggles in a civic thesis: democracy requires effort, not patience. The line’s brilliance is that it makes action feel like virtue and hesitation feel like complicity.