Leadership Quote by Dan Quayle

It lands like a marching chant, which is exactly the point: not to inform, but to reassure. Dan Quayle’s line piles motion on motion - forward, upward, onward - until “movement” becomes the message. The specificity is deliberately thin. There’s no destination, no obstacle, no cost. Just a promise of momentum, delivered with the rhythmic certainty of someone trying to project steadiness in a job defined by proximity to power rather than direct command of it.

The intent is classic campaign-era mood management: convert uncertainty into a feeling of inevitability. “Forward” signals progress, “upward” adds a moral and economic implication (growth, improvement, uplift), and “onward” is the clincher, the word you use when you can’t quite name the next step but you need the audience to keep walking with you. The repeated “we” performs inclusion; it drafts the listener into the project and quietly distributes responsibility. If things go well, we did it together. If they don’t, the subject is still “we.”

The subtext is also Quayle in miniature: earnest, eager, and vulnerable to the kind of rhetorical overcranking that made him an easy punchline in late-80s/early-90s political culture. The line isn’t a policy argument; it’s an aura argument. In context, that matters. A vice president often sells continuity and confidence on behalf of an administration. This phrase tries to sound like history advancing - even if it never specifies what history is supposed to become.