Leadership Quote by Frank B. Kellogg

Progress always wants to look like a switch flip; Kellogg reminds you it’s more like weather. “It is not to be expected that human nature will change in a day” reads as sober counsel, but it’s also a political instrument: a sentence that lowers the public’s demand for instant moral transformation and raises tolerance for slow, procedural work.

Coming from a U.S. statesman of the interwar era, the line carries the cadence of diplomacy and institution-building. Kellogg helped broker the Kellogg-Briand Pact, that famous attempt to outlaw war on paper while the world’s appetites for power, fear, and grievance remained stubbornly intact. The quote’s surface humility (don’t be naive) doubles as an argument for incrementalism: treaties, courts, norms, and pressure campaigns can shape behavior even if they can’t rewrite the species. It’s the voice of someone who knows that international agreements are often less about converting hearts than constraining options.

The subtext is a warning aimed at two audiences at once. To idealists, it says: don’t mistake aspiration for reality; you’ll burn out and discredit the project. To cynics, it says: human nature may be constant, but it’s not destiny; the best you can do is build guardrails that make our worst instincts harder to indulge.

The line works because it’s modest in grammar and ambitious in implication. It grants the permanence of human flaws while insisting that politics is still worth doing, precisely because perfection isn’t on the table.