Daily Inspiration Quote by Rafic Hariri

Hariri’s line lands with the quiet insistence of a man describing a building whose foundations have cracked: before you add floors, you stabilize the ground. “Restore the confidence” sounds abstract, almost managerial, but in a fragile state it’s a hard political technology. Confidence is what gets depositors to keep money in banks, investors to bet on tomorrow, diaspora families to send remittances, militias to stand down, and citizens to accept sacrifice without assuming they’re being played. Hariri is naming the precondition for everything else he was selling: reconstruction, growth, normalcy.

The phrasing also smuggles in a diagnosis. If confidence needs restoring, it has been squandered by war, corruption, paralysis, and the perpetual sense that Lebanon’s future is being negotiated elsewhere. Hariri doesn’t say “trust in government” or “faith in institutions”; he says “in the country,” widening the target to something almost existential. It’s nation-branding, but also nation-repair: a plea to treat Lebanon not as a temporary arrangement between factions and foreign patrons, but as a credible project.

“First of all” is the power move. It ranks priorities and subtly rebukes rivals who want to start with spoils, patronage, or ideological victories. Hariri’s broader context - post-civil-war rebuilding, massive inflows of capital, and looming geopolitical pressure - makes the line read like both reassurance and warning: without confidence, the whole reconstruction story becomes debt, illusion, and a state that can’t persuade its people to stay invested in it.