Success Quote by Warren Christopher

Courtrooms are designed to bait you into self-sabotage. Warren Christopher’s line reads like mild etiquette, but it’s really a survival tip from a man who lived inside institutions where composure is currency. “Very important” is doing quiet work here: not moralizing, not therapizing, just marking a rule of power. In a courtroom, anger isn’t merely a feeling; it’s a signal flare that tells the judge, jury, and opposing counsel exactly where you’re vulnerable. Lose your temper and you hand the room a narrative: unstable, evasive, guilty, unserious. The legal system pretends to weigh facts, but it also weighs temperament.

Christopher’s subtext is bureaucratic realism. As a statesman and lawyerly operator (deputy attorney general, secretary of state), he understood that the people who “win” in formal arenas aren’t always the most right; they’re the most legible within the arena’s rules. Anger makes you illegible. It scrambles your timing, loosens your language, invites the other side to steer you with a well-placed insult. Calm, by contrast, is strategic opacity: you deny your opponent feedback.

The kicker is the add-on: “or in anything else you’re doing.” That broadens the maxim from courtroom craft to a whole governing philosophy. Christopher was often criticized as cautious, even bloodless, during crises. This sentence defends that style. Temper, in his worldview, isn’t authenticity; it’s an unforced error. In high-stakes public life, self-control isn’t virtue signaling. It’s leverage.