Leadership Quote by William Lyon Mackenzie King

Bureaucratic restraint is doing the heavy lifting here: "for one cause or another" is a politician's fog machine, a phrase that acknowledges crisis without naming culprits, errors, or even a specific enemy. Mackenzie King doesn’t argue for restrictions so much as he normalizes them, presenting scarcity and state control as a tidy administrative response to unnamed pressures. That vagueness is the point. It converts what could be public anger - rationing, price controls, limits on consumption - into something that sounds like mere housekeeping.

"It has become necessary" is the classic passive-voice absolution. Necessity arrives like weather; no one chose it, no one benefits from it, no one can be blamed for it. Then comes the kicker: "including not a few of the necessities of life". The phrase signals empathy while also preparing the listener for discomfort. It's a rhetorical inoculation: yes, this will touch essentials, and yes, we know that sounds harsh, but we're adults in a serious moment.

The likely context is wartime governance and the home-front economy, where controlling commodities becomes a tool for both fairness and mobilization. King’s genius - and his tell - is managerial moralism: the state isn’t seizing; it’s allocating. The subtext is social discipline dressed as collective care. You hear an attempt to keep a diverse public coalition calm: accept limits now, because the alternative is chaos later, and arguing about causes is a luxury we can’t afford.