Leadership Quote by Barbara Jordan

Jordan’s line is a rebuke disguised as a civic instruction: stop hiding behind ambiguity. “The imperative” isn’t a suggestion or a vibe; it’s a mandate, the kind of language politicians often reserve for war or emergency. She redirects that urgency toward ethics, insisting that the first job of public life is moral clarity, not tactical cleverness.

The construction does two things at once. “Define what is right” acknowledges that rightness isn’t always self-evident; it has to be argued for, named, made legible to a public that’s been trained to accept euphemism. In Jordan’s era and in ours, corruption and injustice don’t typically arrive announcing themselves. They come wrapped in procedure, in “just following the rules,” in plausible deniability. Defining “right” becomes an act of power: you strip away the fog that lets institutions excuse themselves.

Then she removes the favorite escape hatch: “and do it.” It’s a concise shot at performative virtue and at the bureaucratic habit of treating values as talking points. Jordan, a constitutional thinker with preacherly cadence, is insisting that ethics without action is just branding.

Context matters: Jordan’s most famous moments came during the Watergate hearings and later as a moral anchor in debates over governance and rights. Her authority wasn’t theatrical; it was earned through precision and restraint. The subtext is almost prosecutorial: if you can define the right thing and still refuse to act, you’re not confused. You’re complicit.