Leadership Quote by Dan Quayle

Quayle is trying to turn a career-defining vulnerability into an occupational hazard. The line is defensive but also sneakily aspirational: he wants to be heard as a prolific public speaker whose only risk is the normal human slip of the tongue. The comedy, of course, is that the culture had already cast him as a symbol of verbal ineptitude, and he’s attempting to reframe that narrative using the language of overwork and authenticity.

The phrasing does a lot of accidental work. “As many speeches” and “talk as much as I do” is self-credentialing; it implies experience, stamina, relevance. “Get away from the text” signals spontaneity, the kind of off-script ease politicians sell as sincerity. But the hedge words - “always a possibility,” “a few words,” “tangled here and there” - shrink the offense to a minor, random mishap. It’s not incompetence, just the entropy of live performance.

Context matters: Quayle’s vice presidency unfolded under a media ecosystem newly hungry for gaffes as character evidence. His malapropisms weren’t treated as isolated mistakes; they became a shorthand for doubts about readiness and intelligence. This quote is damage control that inadvertently highlights the imbalance: the more he argues that mistakes are inevitable, the more he confirms that people are listening for them.

It also reveals a modern political bind: the demand to be both scripted (safe) and unscripted (real). Quayle tries to claim the benefits of going off-text while pre-negotiating forgiveness when it goes sideways.