Leadership Quote by Bob Bartlett

“Hills are unpleasant, so I like to get them over with as quickly as possible” lands with the deceptively plainspoken weight of a working politician who knows the terrain is never flat. Bob Bartlett, Alaska’s longtime territorial delegate and later U.S. senator, spent his career translating a place defined by distance, weather, and logistical hardship into language Washington could digest. The line reads like small talk, but it’s really a governing philosophy: don’t romanticize obstacles; dispatch them.

As a politician, Bartlett isn’t selling inspiration so much as competence. “Unpleasant” is a deliberately modest word for what, in public life, can mean entrenched opposition, budget fights, hearings, and the slow grind of infrastructure. By shrinking the drama, he signals steadiness. The subtext is pragmatic masculinity without the chest-thumping: hardship is real, but it doesn’t deserve your awe. It deserves your work.

The sentence also performs a subtle rhetorical judo move. Most leaders frame difficulty as character-building; Bartlett frames it as inefficient. That’s a tell. In the mid-century American political imagination, especially for an Alaskan representing a frontier territory pushing toward statehood, progress depended less on poetry than on throughput: roads, ports, defenses, air routes. “Get them over with” sounds like climbing, but it’s also legislative triage - absorb the pain early, keep momentum, deny your opponents time to turn the hill into a mountain.

It’s a line that flatters the listener, too: you’re not being asked to admire suffering, only to outpace it.