"Nobody but radicals have ever accomplished anything in a great crisis"
About this Quote
In a real crisis, moderation can look less like wisdom and more like a luxury good. Garfield’s line strips away the comforting myth that big emergencies are solved by careful, incremental consensus. “Nobody but radicals” is a deliberately absolutist shove: not a policy memo, a warning shot. He’s arguing that when the house is on fire, the people insisting on a controlled burn are the ones who actually pick up the hose.
The word “radicals” does double work. It’s a compliment to moral urgency and a rebuke to institutional inertia. Garfield isn’t romanticizing chaos; he’s legitimizing the kind of action that feels socially risky until history makes it respectable. The subtext is political triage: in a “great crisis,” the center’s main instinct is preservation - of norms, of coalitions, of personal futures. Radicals, by definition, have less to lose and more to prove, so they’ll push past the usual veto points.
Context matters: Garfield came of age as an antislavery Republican and Civil War-era legislator, watching the Union lurch from compromise to catastrophe. The decades before the war were thick with “moderate” bargains that didn’t prevent rupture; they postponed it while deepening the moral debt. Afterward, Reconstruction’s partial retreat offered a fresh lesson in what happens when resolve gets negotiated down to palatability.
As a president, Garfield also knew the irony: leadership often requires radical energy, then demands you govern the day after. The quote praises the shock troops of change while quietly admitting that crises don’t reward careful reputations - they reward people willing to be called unreasonable until the emergency passes.
The word “radicals” does double work. It’s a compliment to moral urgency and a rebuke to institutional inertia. Garfield isn’t romanticizing chaos; he’s legitimizing the kind of action that feels socially risky until history makes it respectable. The subtext is political triage: in a “great crisis,” the center’s main instinct is preservation - of norms, of coalitions, of personal futures. Radicals, by definition, have less to lose and more to prove, so they’ll push past the usual veto points.
Context matters: Garfield came of age as an antislavery Republican and Civil War-era legislator, watching the Union lurch from compromise to catastrophe. The decades before the war were thick with “moderate” bargains that didn’t prevent rupture; they postponed it while deepening the moral debt. Afterward, Reconstruction’s partial retreat offered a fresh lesson in what happens when resolve gets negotiated down to palatability.
As a president, Garfield also knew the irony: leadership often requires radical energy, then demands you govern the day after. The quote praises the shock troops of change while quietly admitting that crises don’t reward careful reputations - they reward people willing to be called unreasonable until the emergency passes.
Quote Details
| Topic | Leadership |
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