Leadership Quote by Sargent Shriver

A politician’s worst nightmare isn’t ignorance; it’s the pose of omniscience paired with total disbelief. Shriver’s line takes a familiar civic type - the person who can recite every fact, anticipate every counterargument, and still refuses any stake in the world - and brands him not merely annoying but morally bankrupt. “Knows all things” signals the technocrat’s arsenal: expertise, data, the confident posture of mastery. “Believes nothing” is the kicker, aimed at the cultivated cynicism that treats ideals as marketing and commitment as naivete. Shriver isn’t attacking doubt; he’s attacking the kind of doubt that becomes a lifestyle, a way to stay clean by never choosing.

The word “damned” does double duty. It borrows religious gravity to condemn a secular sin: detachment. In public life, disbelief isn’t neutral; it’s parasitic. If you believe nothing, you can justify anything, because no principle ever gets to overrule convenience. Shriver’s Catholic-inflected moral language turns skepticism into a spiritual vacancy, suggesting that a mind stuffed with information but emptied of faith - in people, in democracy, in the possibility of progress - is a kind of self-made hell.

Context matters: Shriver belonged to the mid-century liberal project that built institutions (Peace Corps, anti-poverty programs) on the premise that idealism could be operationalized. The quote reads like a warning shot across the bow of modern governance: expertise without conviction doesn’t make you wise; it makes you untouchable, and therefore dangerous.