Leadership Quote by Donald Rumsfeld

A bureaucrat’s shrug dressed up as folk wisdom, Rumsfeld’s line works because it flatters the speaker’s toughness while quietly lowering the bar for accountability. On its face, it’s a truism about impossibility: consensus is unattainable, so stop chasing it. Underneath, it’s also a preemptive alibi. If displeasure is inevitable, then complaints become background noise rather than evidence that a decision was flawed, poorly communicated, or ethically compromised.

The phrasing is doing more than it seems. “Try” frames the problem as effort, not outcome; “please” reduces politics to customer service, replacing obligations and rights with satisfaction metrics. The kicker is the vagueness of “somebody.” Not the public, not allies, not Congress, not soldiers or civilians - just an abstract heckler. That anonymity is strategic: it collapses vastly different kinds of dissent (partisan grumbling vs. substantive critique) into the same harmless category.

Context matters because Rumsfeld was a master of managing uncertainty as a political asset, especially during the post-9/11 era when contested intelligence and disputed strategies demanded rhetorical insulation. This is the logic of the national security state translated into everyday language: decisions must be made under pressure; disagreement is proof of seriousness; critics are inevitable and therefore ignorable.

It’s a sentence designed to harden leadership against empathy - and to ask the audience to admire that hardness as virtue.