Leadership Quote by Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Moynihan’s line flatters American capitalism while quietly warning you about it. By insisting that “great corporations” aren’t built by “ordinary people,” he’s puncturing a comforting civic myth: that the marketplace is a tidy meritocracy where diligence and decency naturally rise to the top. His list of virtues is telling, and the last word does the real work. “Intelligence” and “ambition” read like the polite résumé version of success; “aggressiveness” drags the sentence into the realm of power, appetite, and collision. It’s praise with teeth.

The intent is double-edged. On one level, it’s an argument for realism in policymaking: if corporate America is created by unusually driven actors, then the state can’t regulate it as if it’s dealing with a neighborhood PTA. On another level, it’s a subtle critique of the reverence Americans often extend to business founders. “Extraordinary” doesn’t mean virtuous; it means atypical, sometimes socially disruptive. Aggressiveness is how empires get built, and also how rules get tested, bent, and rewritten.

Context matters because Moynihan was a policy-minded politician in an era when corporate power and managerial capitalism were expanding and professionalizing, and when “government vs. business” was becoming a defining ideological battlefield. He’s not romanticizing entrepreneurs; he’s describing a governing problem. If you want “great corporations,” you’re also signing up to live with the personalities and incentives that produce them.