Leadership Quote by Sam Rayburn

A politician admitting he likes power is usually treated like a gaffe. Sam Rayburn turns it into a kind of blunt credential. Coming from the longest-serving Speaker of the House, the line doesn’t read as megalomania so much as a refusal to dress up the job in civic perfume. In Rayburn’s Washington, power wasn’t an abstract evil or a philosophical puzzle; it was the operating system of government. If you didn’t like it, you probably wouldn’t learn how to count votes, cut deals, or move legislation through the choke points where it typically dies.

The specific intent is disarmingly practical: he’s signaling competence and appetite in the same breath. Rayburn isn’t saying, “I crave control”; he’s saying, “I understand what this office is for.” The subtext is a rebuke to the performative purity of politics, the kind that treats ambition as shameful while quietly benefiting from the machinery ambition builds. Rayburn’s power is implied to be institutional rather than personal: the Speaker’s leverage comes from committees, schedules, patronage, and procedural fluency. “Use it” matters as much as “like it.” It frames power as a tool that should produce outcomes, not a trophy to be admired.

Context sharpens the edge. Rayburn rose through an era of New Deal expansion, wartime mobilization, and postwar realignment - moments when government either asserts itself or cedes the field. The line is almost a warning: in a system where power will be wielded regardless, the real question is by whom, and to what ends.