Leadership Quote by George Soros

Soros is doing something unfashionable in post-9/11-style security talk: treating counterterrorism less like a manhunt and more like a legitimacy contest. The line starts with a blunt tactical premise - “sympathy” is an operational advantage. If a militant group can hide inside a community’s moral permission structure, intelligence dries up, cooperation evaporates, and the state ends up fighting shadows. He’s not romanticizing “root causes”; he’s describing how social consent functions as camouflage.

The pivot is the real tell: “we need people on our side” becomes a demand for “responsible leaders of the world.” That phrasing carries the subtext of U.S.-centered power, but it’s also a critique of it. Soros implies that military and surveillance capacity are secondary to perceived fairness. “Leadership” here doesn’t mean chest-thumping; it means behaving in ways that don’t manufacture the very resentment extremist recruiters feed on. His closing clause - “show some concern with the problems” - is deliberately broad, almost lawyerly, because the point isn’t a single policy but an orientation: if you want actionable cooperation, you can’t treat whole regions as collateral.

As a businessman-philanthropist, Soros frames ethics as strategy. It’s a market logic applied to geopolitics: trust is capital, squandered fast and costly to rebuild. The message to hardliners is sharp: brutality and hypocrisy aren’t just immoral; they’re inefficient.