Education Quote by Stuart Symington

There is a businessman’s cold clarity in Symington’s line: responsibility is a liability unless it comes packaged with power. It’s not a moral aphorism so much as an operating rule from the world of balance sheets, where accountability without control isn’t “leadership,” it’s a setup. The phrasing “learned many years ago” signals hard-earned scar tissue, not theory. He’s warning you he’s seen how institutions protect themselves by assigning blame downward while keeping decision-making upward.

The bite comes from the pivot to Washington. By invoking “the new Secretary of Defense” and “budgets sharply cut,” Symington sketches a familiar Beltway ritual: you inherit an office, get handed a mission, then discover the money - and the authority - have already been negotiated away. The Secretary becomes the public face of a promise he can’t fully keep. Symington’s subtext is that budget cuts don’t just shrink programs; they quietly rearrange the chain of command, leaving top officials responsible for outcomes they can’t realistically deliver.

Context matters here. Symington straddled private enterprise and public service, and he was deeply involved in defense policy during an era when military spending and strategy were intensely politicized. The quote is less about the Pentagon than about governance itself: institutions love “responsibility” as a press-release word. Authority is what they ration. The line works because it punctures the civic romance of office with a transactional truth: if you can’t steer, don’t agree to be the driver.