Daily Inspiration Quote by Don Marquis

Marquis turns the moralist’s favorite insult into a trapdoor. “A hypocrite is a person who - but who isn’t?” starts like a definition and then refuses to finish the job, yanking the reader into the punchline: the category is so broad it collapses into everyone. The dash matters. It’s the moment the sermon should arrive - a tidy rule, a clean target - and instead we get a shrug that doubles as an accusation.

The intent isn’t to excuse hypocrisy so much as to puncture the smugness that often accompanies calling it out. Marquis, a journalist steeped in the early 20th-century American marketplace of uplift, reform, and public virtue, knew how quickly “hypocrite” becomes a social weapon: a way to claim the high ground without inspecting your own footwear. His quip flips the hierarchy. If hypocrisy is universal, then moral posturing is just hypocrisy with better branding.

Subtext: ideals are necessary, but they’re also impossible to inhabit perfectly. Most people live in the gap between what they believe, what they say, and what they can actually manage under pressure - social, economic, romantic, political. Marquis compresses that messy reality into a single, elegant dodge: no example is needed because you are the example.

It’s also a newsroom line: compact, quotable, anti-pomp. In an era when public reputations were increasingly manufactured and policed, Marquis doesn’t offer purity; he offers a more uncomfortable ethic - start with self-recognition, then decide how much outrage you can honestly afford.