Leadership Quote by Chauncey Depew

Depew’s line is ambition boiled down to a procedural rule: before you can move, you have to revoke your loyalty to stasis. It’s a politician’s version of ignition - not the messy work of building roads or passing bills, but the clean, rhetorically satisfying moment when a person (or a nation) declares, almost ceremonially, that the present is no longer acceptable.

The intent is practical persuasion. Depew isn’t selling a destination; he’s selling a posture. “Getting somewhere” stays conveniently vague, a wide-open placeholder that lets listeners project their own ladder-climb onto the sentence. The subtext is tougher than it sounds: progress begins as an act of refusal. “Decide” turns life into a matter of will, implying that stuckness is, at least partly, a choice - a bracing message if you’re courting voters who want to feel agency in an economy and society that often deny it.

Context matters. Depew was a Gilded Age operator: a Republican power broker, a railroad lawyer, a master of after-dinner uplift in an era that fetishized self-making while running on patronage and corporate consolidation. That tension is why the quote works. It flatters the individual’s autonomy while neatly sidestepping the structural forces that keep many people exactly where they are. The sentence functions like a campaign promise in miniature: it converts uncertainty into momentum, and momentum into virtue.

It’s also a subtle piece of moral pressure. If the “first step” is simply a decision, then failure to advance can be framed as a failure of character. In Depew’s hands, optimism becomes a discipline - and a useful one for anyone trying to mobilize a crowd.