Leadership Quote by Calvin Coolidge

Coolidge’s line has the stern clarity of a man who believed government should stop pretending it can outrun cause and effect. “Those who trust to chance” isn’t just a warning about gambling or reckless decisions; it’s a rebuke to a culture of wishful thinking. The sentence is built like a courthouse door: trust to chance, then “must abide.” No romance, no rescue clause. It’s moral language disguised as practical advice.

As a president associated with small-government restraint and a kind of Yankee Protestant discipline, Coolidge is asserting a worldview in which outcomes are earned, not managed. The subtext is accountability: if you refuse planning, competence, or responsibility, you don’t get to complain when randomness bites back. It also carries a political edge. In the 1920s, the U.S. was intoxicated by boom economics and speculative fever; “chance” wasn’t abstract. It was margin debt, get-rich confidence, and the belief that prosperity was self-sustaining. Read with hindsight toward the 1929 crash, the line lands like an unintentional epitaph for an era that mistook luck for stability.

The quote works because it’s coldly symmetrical. It turns chance from a thrilling possibility into a tyrant you’ve voluntarily hired. Coolidge isn’t arguing that chance can be eliminated; he’s saying that outsourcing your decisions to it is still a decision, and one that forfeits the right to indignation when the bill arrives.