The Backstreet Boys once sang, “It’s only words.”

Which, at the time, felt like a tragic discovery. A young man realising that “I love you” had begun to sound like “please pass the salt”. The words were still there. The meaning had quietly packed its bags and left.

I thought of that line again when I heard Mark Carney at Davos say, “If you are not at the table, you are on the menu.”

It is only words. Fourteen of them. But suddenly you can see the situation. A table. A menu. A future you would rather not be part of. No charts. No jargon. Just a mental picture and a mild sense of doom.

This is not about politics or ideology.

It is about language. About how some sentences do more work than entire policy documents.
“Fear itself.” “You can’t eat ideology.” “No one left behind.” “Kindness is not a weakness.”

These are not explanations. They are handles. You can pick them up and carry them around. They survive translation. They survive headlines. And the passage of time.

I remember the original Tata Indica tagline. “More car per car.”
Not mileage.
Not torque.
Just an idea small enough to fit in your pocket.

These lines do the same thing.
More meaning per word.

Which brings us back to the Backstreet Boys. They were right, in a strange way.

It is only words. But that is exactly why it matters. When words are simple, visual and human, they stop being decoration and start becoming containers. They hold fear. Or dignity. Or hope. Or threat. Or belonging.

So a boy band lyric and a Davos soundbite end up doing the same job: reminding us that language, when it works, doesn’t shout.
It packs.
And once it packs well enough, it travels further than speeches ever will.

Only words.
But very well packed ones.

What follows is a small curation of 20 of my favourite “more meaning per word” lines — from leaders and thinkers.

Not for their politics, but for how neatly they pack a worldview into a sentence.

If you have a line like this — one that stuck with you long after the speech was forgotten — I’d love to add it to the collection.

My List

“We will not beg.” — Paul Kagame

“Peace is made with enemies, not with friends.” — Yitzhak Rabin

“You can’t eat ideology.” — Mahathir Mohamad

“No one left behind.” — Anthony Albanese

“It does not matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.” — Deng Xiaoping

“Kindness is not a weakness.” — Julia Gillard

“You Are Either With Us, Or With the Terrorists.” — George W. Bush

“Development is about people, not things.” — Julius Nyerere

“Speak softly and carry a big stick.” — Theodore Roosevelt

“We want life like other peoples want life.” — Mahmoud Darwish

“The world is bigger than five.” — Recep Tayyip Erdoğan

“Real power is… when you have nothing, you still have dignity.” — Nelson Mandela

“Hide your strength, bide your time.” — Deng Xiaoping

“If you are not at the table, you are on the menu.” — Mark Carney

“Minimum government, maximum governance.” — Narendra Modi

“An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” — Mahatma Gandhi

“A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.” — Nelson Mandela

“We will make Singapore a first-world oasis in a third-world region.” — Lee Kuan Yew

“The only thing we have to fear is… fear itself.” — Franklin D. Roosevelt

“Optimists and pessimists die the same way. They just live differently.” — Shimon Peres

Your turn. What are lines that have stayed with you?