Leadership Quote by Bernadette Devlin

The line turns political courage into a timeline: struggle isn’t the consolation prize before victory, it’s the rehearsal that makes victory imaginable. Devlin’s “dared” does the heavy lifting. It recasts activism as an act of defiance against not just an opponent, but an entire atmosphere designed to make ambition feel presumptuous - especially for the young, the working-class, and the colonized. Struggle is framed as a chosen risk, not a tragic condition. Winning, then, isn’t triumphalism; it’s the audacity to claim outcomes in a world that prefers you stay grateful for mere survival.

The subtext is aimed as much inward as outward. “Yesterday” and “Today” create a personal rhythm of escalation, a self-issued permission slip that doubles as marching orders for a movement. Devlin doesn’t romanticize suffering; she telescopes it. The quote implies a ruthless lesson from street politics: you can’t skip the stage where you look foolish, lose, get hit back, and keep going. That’s why “win” lands - because it refuses the respectable role of permanent protester.

Context matters. Devlin emerged in Northern Ireland at a moment when civil rights demands were met with state force and sectarian backlash. As a young woman speaking with unsparing clarity in a masculinized, militarized arena, she embodied the message: the real scandal isn’t dissent, it’s the expectation that dissent should know its place. The sentence is compact propaganda for hope, but also a warning: daring is cumulative, and power only yields when someone insists on taking it.