Daily Inspiration Quote by George P. Shultz

Secrecy, in Shultz's formulation, behaves less like a lock and more like a flare. The line has the clipped pragmatism of a man who spent decades inside rooms where labels like "Top Secret" were supposed to slow information down, not accelerate it. Instead, he points to a bureaucratic paradox: the more tightly the state tries to control a fact, the more it advertises that the fact is valuable, urgent, and potentially explosive.

The specific intent is managerial and ethical at once. Shultz isn't romanticizing leaks; he's warning decision-makers that classification is not a magic spell. Mark something highly secret and you expand the number of people who know it exists, increase the status incentives around it, and raise the stakes for anyone tempted to share it. "Higher classification" also tends to mean "bigger political consequence", which invites rivalries, press interest, and the human impulse to trade in scarcity.

The subtext is a critique of classification inflation. In late Cold War and post-Vietnam Washington, secrecy often served not just national security but institutional self-protection: hiding errors, shielding fragile policies, controlling narratives. Shultz, who navigated Iran-Contra-era turbulence and the machinery of U.S. foreign policy, understood that overclassification creates its own leak economy. People don't rush to report trivia; they rush to report what power signals it fears.

The line works because it punctures the comforting fiction that the state can simply decree silence. It reframes secrecy as an attention machine, turning the government's most restrictive stamp into a public relations label: Handle with care, therefore handle with curiosity.