Success Quote by Walter Lippmann

A real leader, Lippmann suggests, is less a dazzling performer than a careful stagehand: the point is not to keep the room dependent on your brilliance, but to arrange the props so anyone competent can run the show after you leave. It is a quietly deflating definition of “genius,” aimed at a culture that mistakes charisma, speed, and grand pronouncements for durable accomplishment.

The line works because it flips the usual mythology. We tend to praise leaders for singular vision, for the exceptional mind that sees what others can’t. Lippmann’s jab is that this style of leadership is often a disguised failure of design: if only a genius can manage what you built, you didn’t build something sound. “Common sense” is the tell here. He’s not romanticizing bureaucracy; he’s demanding legibility. The best outcome of exceptional talent is a system that no longer requires it.

The subtext is institutional, and a little suspicious of hero-worship. Lippmann came of age amid the early 20th century’s mass politics, propaganda, and “great man” narratives, then watched crises (depression, world war, the Cold War state) harden governance into permanent emergency. In that environment, leaders can justify extraordinary power by insisting only they can navigate extraordinary times. Lippmann counters with a democratic standard: leadership is accountable when its results are transferable. If your successor needs your “grace of genius” to keep the lights on, your legacy isn’t greatness; it’s fragility dressed up as fate.