Leadership Quote by Shirley Chisholm

Chisholm’s line lands like a shrug that’s also an accusation: in American life, “profit” doesn’t merely compete with “morality” - it routinely outranks it. The blunt construction (“it is seldom”) matters. She isn’t offering a tragic exception or a scandalous one-off; she’s describing a system with a reliable outcome. That cool statistical tone is its own rhetorical weapon, implying that outrage is not enough when the incentives are rigged.

The specific intent is political, not philosophical. Chisholm is warning listeners to stop treating ethical failure as a personal lapse and start seeing it as an institutional default. “When morality comes up against profit” frames the conflict as a collision built into policy: budgets, contracts, lobbying, campaign finance, and the quiet arithmetic of what gets funded and what gets sacrificed. The subtext is that appeals to conscience are easily absorbed, repackaged, and neutralized when money is on the line - especially for communities without leverage.

Context sharpens the bite. As the first Black woman elected to Congress and a 1972 presidential candidate, Chisholm fought in arenas where moral language was abundant and material outcomes were stingy: civil rights, social welfare, war, urban disinvestment, workplace discrimination. She watched lofty rhetoric coexist with profitable inequity, and she learned that “values” often become branding while profits remain policy.

The line works because it refuses comfort. It doesn’t flatter the public’s self-image; it challenges the lazy belief that the moral argument, presented clearly enough, will naturally win. Chisholm is effectively saying: if you want morality to beat profit, you have to change what pays.