Leadership Quote by David Dinkins

Luck is a politically safe emotion: it sounds humble, it dodges bragging, and it lets a public figure acknowledge achievement without triggering the audience’s allergy to self-congratulation. David Dinkins’s double-down - "very, very" and then again "very" - isn’t stylistic laziness so much as a practiced softening. Repetition turns what could be a résumé line into a kind of moral posture. He’s not claiming destiny or genius; he’s claiming gratitude.

The subtext is that survival and success in politics, especially for a Black leader of his era, are never purely meritocratic. Saying "lucky" is a way to nod toward the contingency of history without turning the moment into a grievance speech. It’s also a way to spread credit around. "Fortunate" implies conditions and people: mentors, voters, timing, family, coalitions. In machine-heavy, media-saturated New York politics, it quietly acknowledges how many gears have to mesh for one person to rise.

Context matters because Dinkins governed at a moment when the city was anxious about crime, race, and economic change, and when his own mayoralty was routinely filtered through unfair expectations. Declaring himself "fortunate" reads as a refusal to perform bitterness or swagger. It’s a small rhetorical act of steadiness: a politician insisting on decency as brand and ballast. The line works because it’s disarming, but not empty - gratitude here doubles as a coded history lesson about who usually gets to feel "lucky" in American public life.