Leadership Quote by George Savile

Savile treats hope the way an experienced politician treats a crowd: useful to have around, dangerous to follow. The line is built on a neat double move. First, it demotes hope from compass to companion. A guide implies direction, judgment, strategy - the very things Enlightenment-era statesmen liked to claim for themselves. Calling hope a "wrong guide" punctures the comforting idea that optimism has predictive power. Hope doesn’t tell you what will happen; it tells you what you want to happen, and those are rarely the same.

Then comes the soft landing: "good company along the way". Savile isn’t preaching bleakness. He’s acknowledging the psychological utility of hope as morale, not method. In politics, that distinction is survival. Leaders must sell possibility to keep coalitions intact and spirits up, while privately making decisions in the colder language of odds, constraints, and incentives. The subtext is almost administrative: keep hope in the room, but don’t let it run the meeting.

Context matters. Savile lived in an Britain where patronage, parliamentary maneuvering, and imperial risk made outcomes volatile and promises cheap. "Hope" was often what the public was offered when accountability was thin. The aphorism reads like an insider’s corrective to the rhetoric of reassurance: hope can steady the nerves during uncertainty, but it becomes a liability when it substitutes for planning, evidence, or hard compromise.

It’s a compact ethic for modern life, too: optimism as emotional stamina, not epistemology.