Time & Perspective Quote by Frank B. Kellogg

A politician doesn’t talk about “broader vision” unless he’s also drawing a boundary line around narrower, less flattering motives. Kellogg’s phrasing flatters the far-sighted while gently quarantining the skeptics: if you doubt the “hope of humanity for peace,” you’re not just pessimistic, you’re small. That’s the rhetorical move here - moral credentialing disguised as modest agreement.

The key tell is “signs of the time.” It’s an elastic, almost prophetic phrase that lets him claim historical momentum without naming the messy specifics that could be challenged. In the 1920s, that ambiguity was useful. The First World War had left publics hungry for guarantees, and diplomatic culture was experimenting with ambitious - some would say magical - legal language about outlawing war. Kellogg, as U.S. Secretary of State and the namesake of the Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928), helped sell the idea that peace could be engineered through international commitments. This sentence reads like part of that sales pitch.

The subtext is less starry-eyed than it looks. “I share the opinion” is a deflection of ownership: he’s not promising peace; he’s aligning himself with those who already believe it’s arriving. That matters because the quote is doing political work at home and abroad - projecting reasonableness, modernity, and moral leadership without binding the speaker to concrete enforcement. It’s optimism with an escape hatch, the kind of hope that sounds like history’s verdict while remaining safely immune to history’s consequences.