Leadership Quote by Calvin Coolidge

Coolidge’s sentence is a quiet rebuke to the politics of the raid, the ban, the crackdown. Coming from a president whose brand was restraint, it’s a surprisingly pointed argument: stop imagining the state can engineer virtue by strangling vice. “Merely attempting to repress” frames punishment as an inadequate default, a reflex that feels busy but rarely changes the underlying weather. Evil, in this view, isn’t a switch you flip off; it’s a condition that adapts, hides, metastasizes.

The subtext is classic Coolidge-era moral realism with a modern policy edge. Early-20th-century America was deep in reformist zeal and moral legislation, from Prohibition to censorship campaigns to the policing of “undesirable” behavior. Coolidge doesn’t directly scold the crusaders, but he drains their confidence: repression may satisfy the public’s appetite for certainty, yet it can’t build a stable civic culture. The “great hope” line pivots from enforcement to cultivation, implying institutions that expand opportunity, strengthen community norms, and reward constructive behavior rather than simply criminalizing destructive ones.

Rhetorically, the quote works because it shifts the moral battleground. It refuses the melodrama of purging sin and replaces it with the pragmatics of investment. “Developing what is good” is deliberately open-ended, inviting consensus where “evil” invites faction. It’s also a subtle defense of limited government without sounding like abdication: the state’s role isn’t to wage permanent war on human nature, but to create conditions where better impulses can win more often. In a country addicted to moral panic cycles, Coolidge is arguing for a politics of building instead of hunting.