Leadership Quote by Robert Dale Owen

Flattery, here, is doing the heavy lifting of persuasion. Owen’s sentence builds a ceremonial pedestal under its unnamed “yourself,” stacking calamity (“public perils so numerous”) and duty (“responsibilities so high and solemn”) until the addressee looks less like a mere officeholder and more like a once-in-ages figure drafted by history. The phrasing is intentionally biblical in scale: “since the foundation of the world” is not an argument so much as a mood, a way of laundering contemporary politics through providential grandeur. If you can make a political moment feel cosmic, you make hesitation feel like heresy.

The craft is in the double bind. By insisting almost no one has ever faced such burdens, Owen both excuses any hard choices and raises the cost of failure. The leader is invited to be heroic, but also warned that ordinary standards won’t apply; they are being watched by posterity, maybe by God. “Environed” and “oppressed” suggest siege conditions, implying that resistance, criticism, or delay are not just inconvenient but morally dangerous in a crisis. It’s a classic statesman’s nudge: accept extraordinary powers or extraordinary measures because the situation is extraordinary.

Contextually, Owen was a reform-minded 19th-century American politician operating in an era when public language loved moral theater: abolition, sectional fracture, and the churn of democratic expansion all rewarded rhetoric that cast governance as a trial of conscience. The line reads like a private letter or formal address meant to stiffen a spine - and to make the recipient’s next move feel inevitable.