Leadership Quote by Stephen F. Lynch

The line wants to sound like common sense dressed up in lab coat authority, and that’s the tell. Lynch doesn’t declare you “wrong”; he diagnoses you. By invoking “the clinical definition of insanity,” he borrows the prestige of medicine to frame persistence as pathology. It’s a rhetorical power move: if your opponents keep pushing the same policy, strategy, or talking point, they’re not merely misguided, they’re irrational.

The phrasing “I am told” is doing quiet work. It gives the speaker plausible deniability (don’t blame me, blame “clinical” truth) while inviting the audience to nod along to something that feels widely known. The quote also trades on a meme-like Einstein misattribution that has circulated for years; in political speech, cultural familiarity often matters more than accuracy. The point isn’t to be medically precise - it isn’t - but to be instantly legible.

Subtextually, it’s about impatience with entrenched systems: bureaucratic inertia, party-line voting, or a legislature stuck rerunning old scripts. “Tenancy” (likely meant as “tendency”) accidentally sharpens the critique: habits become tenants, squatting in institutions long after they’ve stopped paying rent. That slip, if uncorrected, also signals something else about political rhetoric: polish is optional when the punch lands.

In context, a politician reaches for this when arguing for a pivot - new leadership, new tactics, a policy reversal - and needs a moral shortcut. Call repetition “insanity,” and change becomes not just preferable, but sane.