Leadership Quote by Margaret Chase Smith

There is a dry New England practicality to Margaret Chase Smith's line, and that is precisely why it lands. It doesn't romanticize rebellion; it treats doubt as a data point. "When people keep telling you" hints at something sustained and structural, not a single heckler. The repetition implies a chorus: party bosses, newsroom gatekeepers, the familiar civic machinery that polices who gets to attempt what. Smith's phrasing turns that chorus into fuel.

The pivot is "you kind of like to try it". That "kind of" is doing heavy political work. It softens the defiance just enough to sound reasonable, even modest, while smuggling in a steel-spined refusal to accept the assigned limits. It's an old rhetorical trick for outsiders in formal rooms: understate your ambition so it can’t be dismissed as ego, then let the results do the arguing. The sentence frames persistence as temperament, not performance, which also makes it contagious. Anyone can adopt it without needing a heroic origin story.

In Smith's context, the subtext is gender and power, but the quote never begs for sympathy. A woman building authority in 20th-century Washington couldn't always afford open confrontation; she had to master the politics of seeming unthreatening while being immovable. The line reads like a private method turned public ethic: when institutions tell you "no", don't debate the gatekeeper's theory of your limitations. Test the gate.