Leadership Quote by Dan Quayle

Dan Quayle’s line has the odd, inadvertent poetry of a public official trying to sound cosmic and landing in a bureaucratic shrug. “Space is almost infinite” sets up a familiar awe-struck register, the kind of safe grandeur politicians reach for when they want to seem visionary without touching anything controversial. Then comes the self-correction that isn’t a correction: “As a matter of fact, we think it is infinite.” The phrase “as a matter of fact” promises certainty, but what follows is hedged with “we think,” turning fact into vibe. The result is a sentence that performs confidence while quietly admitting it doesn’t have any.

The subtext is institutional more than personal: a vice president speaks in the royal “we,” borrowing the authority of science and the state at once. But the language exposes how political speech often treats expertise as a costume. It gestures toward the NASA-era American mythos - frontier, scale, destiny - while revealing how thin that myth can get when translated into sound bites.

Context matters because Quayle became a cultural symbol of gaffe-prone governance in the late Cold War/early post-Cold War media ecosystem, when TV snippets could harden into a permanent reputation. This quote works less as astronomy than as a miniature of the era’s anxiety about competence: the audience laughs, but the laugh has an edge. It’s funny because it’s small; it’s memorable because it accidentally shows the machinery of authority straining to speak in absolutes and ending up in approximations.