Leadership Quote by Lyndon B. Johnson

Power, in Lyndon B. Johnson's hands, rarely bothered to wear a halo. "There are no favorites in my office. I treat them all with the same general inconsideration" is a brutal little mission statement for a presidency built on leverage, not likability. The line flips the expected virtue of fairness: instead of promising equal respect, LBJ promises equal disregard. Its comic torque comes from that inversion, but the joke lands because it’s also a warning. If everyone gets "inconsideration", no one can claim special access, special warmth, or special protection. That’s not cruelty for sport; it’s management by controlled discomfort.

The subtext is classic Johnson: intimacy as pressure. LBJ was famous for the "Johnson Treatment" - looming, cajoling, flattering, threatening, all in one breath. In that environment, "no favorites" isn’t about impartiality; it’s about keeping aides, senators, and staff off balance, hungry for approval, and therefore movable. "General inconsideration" becomes a leveling device: a reminder that the office is the protagonist, not the people orbiting it.

Context matters. Johnson inherited a nation in trauma after Kennedy’s assassination and then tried to bulldoze history: Civil Rights and the Great Society at home, Vietnam abroad. He needed ruthless tempo. This quip reads like gallows humor from a boss who knows the job corrodes relationships and chooses to preempt resentment with a grin. It’s also a tiny act of self-mythmaking: I’m not petty, I’m efficient. Whether you read it as honesty or alibi depends on how you judge the costs of getting big things done.