Leadership Quote by Richard J. Daley

Daley’s line is a political self-own that somehow still functions as a boast, and that paradox is the point. “We shall reach” sets up the familiar cadence of civic destiny, the kind of forward-marching promise politicians lean on when concrete plans are inconvenient. But he steers that momentum into “platitudes,” a word that, even then, carried the sting of empty talk. Pair it with “achievement” and you get a beautifully clunky chimera: progress measured not in results, but in increasingly polished slogans about results.

The subtext reads like machine-politics candor leaking through the script. Daley was the archetypal big-city boss, a mayor whose power rested on control, patronage, and message discipline. In that world, the appearance of action can matter as much as action, sometimes more. “Greater and greater” isn’t describing better schools or safer streets; it’s describing an arms race of rhetoric. The line accidentally admits that the system is optimized for applause lines: every year, a new ribbon-cutting phrase, a new “moving forward,” a new triumphant abstraction to cover the same unresolved mess.

Context matters because Daley governed during an era when urban America was convulsing - civil rights संघर्ष, white flight, federal scrutiny, Vietnam-era protest - and Chicago became a stage for televised conflict, especially in 1968. In that climate, platitudes aren’t harmless; they’re a defensive architecture. The quote works because it exposes the modern political trick in plain language: if you can’t guarantee outcomes, inflate the language about outcomes until it feels like momentum. Daley makes the quiet part loud, and it lands as both satire and symptom.