Time & Perspective Quote by Michael Foot

Foot’s line lands like a genteel trap: it flatters power with the excuse of busyness, then snaps shut with a moral verdict. The first clause grants the familiar alibi of the powerful - they’re too inundated to read. The second clause turns that alibi into an indictment: if you can’t make time for the one practice that deepens judgment, you shouldn’t be steering anything larger than your diary.

As a politician and famed bibliophile, Foot is doing more than preaching literacy. He’s defending a particular idea of leadership: not the managerial, inbox-clearing executive, but the reflective public servant whose authority is earned through contact with history, argument, and ambiguity. Reading here isn’t a hobby; it’s a technology of humility. It forces a mind to inhabit other people’s premises, to wrestle with complexity, to recognize patterns of error. That’s precisely what power tends to erode. Power compresses time, rewards certainty, and surrounds you with people paid to agree. Reading is the counter-pressure.

The subtext also carries a swipe at modern politics’ performance treadmill. If leadership is defined by relentless motion - the photo op, the crisis meeting, the talking point - then contemplation looks like idleness. Foot insists it’s the opposite: the absence of reading produces leaders who confuse urgency with importance and PR with policy.

It’s an elegant paradox with a democratic edge. By tying fitness for power to a practice anyone can pursue, Foot implies that authority should be answerable to standards beyond charisma and access: intellectual discipline, curiosity, and the willingness to be changed by what you encounter.