Leadership Quote by Brian Schweitzer

Montana gets framed as a place of hard facts: weather, distance, markets, gravity. Schweitzer flips that script by claiming the state for dreamers, not stoics. The line is doing political work in miniature: it turns aspiration into heritage, implying that ambition isn’t an imported coastal luxury but something baked into the local identity. “Always” is the power word. It erases the question of whether big plans are realistic and replaces it with a more flattering premise: dreaming is what Montanans have historically done, so doing it now is simply continuity.

The phrase also launders contradiction. Montana’s mythology is rugged individualism, but “we” is collective, civic, almost communal. Schweitzer uses that tension to his advantage: he can summon frontier self-reliance while arguing for state-scale projects that require coordinated action. In the context of a governor known for boosterish, populist messaging, it’s a permission slip for optimism at a time when rural states are often cast as managing decline. If you’re a “dreamer,” you’re not merely resisting outside pressures; you’re building, inventing, expanding.

There’s subtext aimed at outsiders, too. The sentence subtly rejects the idea that Montana is just scenery or a last refuge from modernity. Dreaming suggests futurity: energy development, education, infrastructure, economic diversification. It’s also a soft rebuttal to cynicism. Instead of arguing policy point-by-point, Schweitzer wraps his agenda in belonging. If dreaming is a Montanan tradition, then opposing the dream risks looking like betrayal, not prudence.