Leadership Quote by Margaret Chase Smith

Greatness, Margaret Chase Smith argues, is a moral category before it is a results category. She’s taking aim at a seductive American reflex: confuse effectiveness with virtue, then baptize whatever worked as “leadership.” Her phrasing is surgical. “Not manifested” rejects the idea that greatness is something you can simply demonstrate with wins and metrics. “Unlimited pragmatism” is the real villain - pragmatism unbounded by principle becomes a blank check, a politics of permanent exception where every shortcut is excused as necessary.

The line “places such a high premium” reads like a warning about incentives. If you reward outcomes alone, you train institutions and leaders to treat law, norms, and human cost as optional. The subtext is less about one scandal than about a culture: the kind of government that can always produce an argument for why rules must bend “this one time,” until bending becomes the rule.

Smith’s context matters. As a Republican senator famous for her 1950 “Declaration of Conscience” against McCarthyism, she wasn’t speaking abstractly. She watched a movement justify intimidation, guilt by association, and reputational destruction as the price of national security. Her quote is a rebuke to that logic and, more broadly, to the bipartisan temptation to treat democracy as a toolbox rather than a covenant.

It works because it refuses the cheap comfort of ends-based morality without pretending politics can be pure. She’s not anti-pragmatism; she’s anti-limitless permission. Greatness, in her view, is what you won’t do to get what you want.