Leadership Quote by Thomas Brackett Reed

The compliment lands like a pie: soft on the face, brutal in the implication. Reed’s line pretends to crown its target with praise, then immediately strips them of adulthood. Admiring someone for their “original discovery” of the Ten Commandments is not admiration at all; it’s a way of saying you’re acting like you invented morality yesterday, and you’re insufferably proud of it.

The genius is in the double mockery. First, the Ten Commandments are the opposite of “original” in any modern sense: ancient, foundational, endlessly recycled. So to claim someone discovered them is to paint them as naïve, self-important, or willfully ignorant of history. Second, the phrase “for which I admire you” narrows the field of virtues down to one absurd item, implying there’s little else to respect. Reed doesn’t argue; he depreciates.

As a Gilded Age politician and a famously caustic parliamentary tactician, Reed understood that in Washington moral posturing is a currency and a cudgel. The line reads as a rebuttal to a sanctimonious colleague - the kind who wraps policy preferences in sermonizing and treats disagreement as sin. Reed’s jab reframes that piety as performance: not a moral compass, but a bid for authority.

It works because it weaponizes the cadence of civility. The sentence is polite enough to be quoted in mixed company, yet sharp enough to puncture the era’s favorite rhetorical disguise: claiming divine clarity when you’re really just claiming the microphone.