Leadership Quote by William Jennings Bryant

He’s drawing a line between the comforting clean-up work of logic and the messy, lived reality of politics. A “correct statement” has a neat enemy: the falsehood you can swat away. But a “profound truth” doesn’t come with that kind of convenience. Its opposite can also be true because “profundity” lives in big, human-scale tensions: freedom and order, mercy and justice, individual ambition and communal responsibility. Bryan (often misspelled “Bryant”) is pointing at the way public life forces you to hold competing goods without pretending one side is simply ignorant or immoral.

The intent is partly defensive and partly strategic. As a populist orator and moral crusader, Bryan needed language that dignified disagreement without surrendering conviction. If your opponent might also be speaking a “profound truth,” then debate becomes less about dunking on error and more about negotiating trade-offs. That’s a move that flatters voters, too: it invites them to feel wise rather than merely partisan.

The subtext is a critique of the weaponized demand for simple answers. In an era of industrial upheaval, class conflict, and fights over modernity (including his famous anti-evolution stance), Bryan faced elites who framed complexity as either sophistication or weakness. This line reframes complexity as maturity: some questions aren’t solved by refutation, only balanced by judgment.

It works rhetorically because it elevates ambiguity without lapsing into mush. You can still believe in truth; you just stop pretending truth always comes in a single, unopposed piece.