Leadership Quote by Margaret Chase Smith

Smith’s line reads like manners, but it’s really governance. “Entitled” is doing heavy work: she frames courtesy not as a reward for agreement or status but as a baseline civic right. In a political culture that thrives on humiliation and purity tests, that word refuses the idea that respect has to be earned through obedience. Courtesy becomes infrastructure, not decoration.

Then she pivots to “constructive criticism” and shifts the power dynamic. Criticism is “to be expected” because public service is accountable by definition; it’s “sought” because a serious leader treats dissent as useful information rather than personal betrayal. The subtext is anti-fragility: if you can’t tolerate critique, you shouldn’t be making decisions for other people. It’s also a quiet rebuke to demagogic politics, where criticism is cast as treason and opponents are stripped of legitimacy. By insisting on criticism that is “constructive,” she draws a boundary around the kind of disagreement that improves institutions, not the kind that corrodes them. She’s not asking for niceness; she’s demanding standards.

Context matters: Smith, the Maine Republican who authored the 1950 “Declaration of Conscience” against McCarthyism, knew what happens when fear turns scrutiny into spectacle. In that climate, courtesy wasn’t quaint; it was resistance to dehumanization. Her sentence is a compact theory of democratic temperament: respect for people, rigorous feedback for ideas, and enough self-command to tell the difference.