Leadership Quote by Jeffrey Archer

Archer’s line is the kind of polished absolution that sounds humane while quietly doing political work. “We all make mistakes” opens with a manufactured humility: a collective “we” that blurs culpability and invites the audience to see error as ordinary weather rather than a specific act with a specific victim. It’s a rhetorical pressure-release valve. By the time you reach “but,” the sentence has already done its softening; accountability is acknowledged only long enough to be dismissed as a shared condition.

The real power sits in “one has to move on.” The shift from “we” to “one” is telling: it universalizes the lesson, turns a personal or institutional mess into an impersonal rule of life. It also relocates obligation. Who, exactly, must move on? Often it’s the public, the press, the people affected. In political speech, “move on” is a command disguised as maturity, a way of framing continued scrutiny as petty, vengeful, or stuck in the past. It’s closure rhetoric without the cost of closure.

Context matters with Archer. As a politician turned bestselling novelist whose public life has been shadowed by scandal and conviction, he has a particular incentive to narrate wrongdoing as a chapter, not a verdict. The sentence reads like a bridge between two careers: the politician’s talent for reframing and the novelist’s instinct for plot momentum. Mistakes become backstory; “moving on” becomes the next page. That’s precisely why it lands: it offers emotional relief, and it quietly asks for amnesia.