Leadership Quote by William Cobbett

Integrity, Cobbett suggests, doesn’t look like saintly flexibility. It looks like stubbornness with a moral alibi. The line is a neat political feint: it flatters the principled while quietly recoding “obstinate” from a vice into an almost necessary side effect of conviction. In an age when “steadiness” was currency and “wavering” was suspicion, he’s offering a way to admire the man who refuses to budge - and to distrust the man who does.

The subtext is tactical. Cobbett was a bruising pamphleteer-turned-politician in a Britain rattled by revolution abroad, reform agitation at home, and a press culture where reputations could be built or shredded weekly. In that environment, changing your mind didn’t read as intellectual growth; it read as purchase, panic, or ambition. So he smuggles a partisan message through a character claim: if you’re constant, you’re honorable; if you compromise, you’re compromised. “Once adopted” is doing work here - it makes opinion sound like a solemn oath, not a provisional judgment.

There’s also a warning tucked inside the compliment. “Generally” hedges, but only slightly: integrity can harden into dogma, and an honest person can become impossible to reason with. Cobbett captures a political truth still recognizable now: we excuse rigidity when it wears the costume of virtue, and we often call it “principle” precisely when it stops listening.