Life & Wisdom Quote by Lynne Cheney

Cheney’s move here is to treat “competitive drive” not as a social habit we can redesign, but as a built-in engine - a phrase like “flies in the face of human nature” turns policy debate into a kind of heresy trial. If competition is nature, then efforts to soften it aren’t just misguided; they’re willfully naïve, an elite fantasy that ignores what kids are “really” like.

The quote’s canny pivot is gender. Cheney concedes what feminists have long argued - girls are no less driven than boys - but she repurposes that concession to defend competition itself, not to interrogate how it’s rewarded, punished, or channeled. It’s equality deployed in service of the status quo: if girls compete too, then competitive institutions don’t need reform; they just need to stop pretending girls require a different moral atmosphere.

The small, almost folksy qualifier - “or at least the little girls I have observed in my immediate family” - does two things at once. It softens the absolutism with a wink of modesty, while also smuggling in authority through intimacy: personal observation as common sense, common sense as proof. That rhetorical strategy matters in Cheney’s broader cultural lane, where “human nature” arguments often function as preemptive strikes against educational or social experimentation. The subtext is less about playground behavior than about policing a particular kind of social ambition: let girls into the contest, yes, but don’t change the rules of the contest.