Leadership Quote by Agnes Macphail

Power doesn’t ask for permission; it moves, and it absorbs the noise. Agnes Macphail’s line reads like a personal motto, but it’s really a strategy for surviving public life when the room is built to doubt you. “Never apologize. Never explain” isn’t moral hardening so much as a refusal to accept the rigged terms of debate: if you’re forced to plead your case in advance, you’ve already ceded authority to your critics. Macphail understood that, for a politician - especially a woman entering Canada’s federal arena in the 1920s - explanation can become an endless tax. The questions never stop being “why you?” instead of “what’s the plan?”

The sentence is engineered for momentum. Two clipped imperatives slam shut the usual exits of defensiveness and people-pleasing. Then the pivot: “Just get the thing done.” Action becomes the argument; results become the rebuttal. It’s not anti-democratic so much as anti-performative, a rejection of politics as etiquette class.

“Let them howl” is the sharpest blade here. It demotes opposition to animal noise: loud, instinctive, ultimately irrelevant to the work at hand. The subtext is bracingly modern: outrage is not evidence. Macphail is also naming a cost of change - that reform invites theatrical backlash - and insisting that the backlash is a sign you’ve hit something real. In an era when women in power were expected to be agreeable, her refusal to soothe is the point. This is discipline dressed as defiance.