Leadership Quote by William Howard Taft

Taft’s line lands with the plainspoken sobriety of a man who distrusted political melodrama and preferred institutional reality to inspirational fog. “We are all imperfect” isn’t humility as performance; it’s a strategic lowering of the temperature. By yoking human fallibility to government’s inevitable flaws, Taft tries to reframe public anger away from moral outrage and toward maintenance: if the machine is built out of imperfect parts, then the job is not to demand purity, but to keep the parts from grinding each other to dust.

The subtext is a defense of bureaucratic expertise at a moment when Americans were newly tempted by big promises. Taft governed in the Progressive Era, when reformers wanted government to do more (trust-busting, labor standards, regulation) but also to be cleaner, faster, and more righteous than the private powers it was meant to police. Taft agrees with the “do more” impulse in practice, yet he warns against the fantasy that expanded state capacity will arrive without friction, compromise, or error. It’s a preemptive argument against cynicism: disappointment is not proof of illegitimacy.

Rhetorically, the sentence works because it starts with the moral mirror (“we”), not the scapegoat (“they”). In a democracy, government failure is never purely external; it’s also an indictment of voters, incentives, and the human material we recruit into public life. Taft’s conservatism here is less ideological than psychological: lower expectations enough to keep faith from collapsing, then do the unglamorous work anyway.