Leadership Quote by Bishweshwar Prasad Koirala

A politician telling you, simply, "Just try to be a decent person" is either disarmingly modest or quietly radical. B.P. Koirala wasn’t a motivational poster; he was a nation-builder in a country repeatedly strained by palace power, party infighting, and the hard math of survival politics. In that setting, “decent” isn’t a soft virtue. It’s a governing standard aimed at the one thing democratic systems can’t legislate into existence: ethical restraint.

The phrasing matters. “Just” lowers the temperature, making the demand sound small, almost private. It’s rhetorical judo: a minimalist sentence that shames grandstanding. “Try” concedes human messiness and political compromise, but it also refuses the favorite alibi of strongmen and ideologues - that history required them to be ruthless. Koirala’s subtext is that no cause, not even nationalism or modernization, redeems indecency as a method.

The line also reads like a rebuke to the performative moralism politicians often traffic in. Decency here isn’t purity or piety; it’s basic civic behavior: don’t lie when truth is costly, don’t weaponize institutions, don’t treat opponents as enemies of the state. For a leader associated with Nepal’s democratic aspirations and subsequent repression, it carries the weight of lived consequence: when politics becomes a contest of force, decency is not naivete - it’s resistance.

Its real punch is how it relocates responsibility. Not to constitutions, not to parties, not to “the system”, but to the individual choosing, day after day, not to cross the line.