Politics & Power Quote by Lawrence Summers

Summers is borrowing a poet’s candle to light a very unpoetic room: the conference call, the policy memo, the mid-crisis briefing where everyone wants certainty and nobody can afford it. By pairing politics with poetry, he smuggles emotion into a domain that pretends to be strictly rational. The line flatters the technocratic imagination: yes, the numbers look terrible, the coalition is fraying, the headlines are screaming, but history has a narrative arc and we’re still on it.

The subtext is persuasion under uncertainty. “Darkest before dawn” is a culturally familiar reassurance, but Summers tweaks it with “sometimes true,” a small hedge that reads like an economist’s conscience. He offers hope without promising it, which is precisely how credibility is built in public life: admit the limits of prediction, then argue for endurance anyway. That “sometimes” also functions as political insulation. If the dawn doesn’t come, the speaker can claim realism; if it does, he can claim foresight.

Contextually, Summers is an emblem of late-20th- and early-21st-century crisis governance, when economists became storytellers-in-chief for recessions, bailouts, and recovery packages. The quote’s intent isn’t to romanticize suffering; it’s to keep institutions from panicking, voters from bolting, and policymakers from mistaking the nadir for the end of the plot. It works because it reframes pain as a phase, not a verdict, while quietly reminding you that politics, like poetry, runs on interpretation as much as on facts.