Leadership Quote by Gijs de Vries

“Ultimately” is doing the heavy lifting here, a word that asks the listener to endure the ugly middle chapters with faith in the ending. Gijs de Vries, speaking as a politician rather than a poet, isn’t offering a lyrical meditation on liberty; he’s making a strategic promise about political physics: free societies bend, but don’t break. The line is built like a moral equation - freedom and democracy on one side, fear and tyranny on the other - and it’s designed to feel settled, almost inevitable. That inevitability is the point. In moments when panic is politically profitable, “ultimately” functions as a brake on the public’s impulse to trade rights for reassurance.

The subtext is about stamina. Fear is framed as powerful but temporary, a tactic; democracy is framed as slower but durable, a system. That’s an argument aimed at citizens tempted by hard measures and at leaders tempted to justify them. It implies that tyranny wins by accelerating time - forcing rushed decisions, emergency logic, permanent exceptions. De Vries counters with the long view: don’t let the timetable of terror become the timetable of governance.

Context matters because de Vries’ career sits in the post-Cold War, post-9/11 European security era, when democracies were asked to harden themselves without hollowing themselves out. The sentence doubles as reassurance and warning: if democracies start borrowing the tools of tyranny to fight tyranny, they may win the battle and lose the “ultimately.”