Success Quote by George P. Shultz

In George P. Shultz's hands, "You've got to dream a little bit if you're going to get somewhere" reads like a quiet rebuke to the bureaucratic impulse to confuse motion with progress. Coming from a man who spent decades inside the machinery of American power, the line carries the weight of lived experience: policy is often an endless procession of memos, meetings, and procedural caution, and none of it guarantees direction. Shultz smuggles in a harder truth: without a guiding vision, even competent governance becomes mere management.

The phrasing matters. "Dream a little bit" deliberately deflates grandiosity. This isn't utopian rhetoric or revolutionary fervor; it's a controlled dose of imagination, calibrated for institutions that distrust anything that sounds like ideology. He frames dreaming not as indulgence but as a prerequisite for arrival: you "get somewhere" only if you first decide where "somewhere" is. The subtext is pragmatic idealism, the kind that can survive the State Department's risk calculus and still push for outcomes larger than the next quarter's news cycle.

Contextually, Shultz belonged to a generation shaped by world war, Cold War brinkmanship, and the long grind of diplomacy. In that arena, the "dream" is less a fantasy than a strategic hypothesis: the belief that a different future is possible is what makes negotiation worth the pain. It's an argument for ambition with adult supervision - vision tethered to reality, but still unmistakably vision.