Daily Inspiration Quote by Vernon A. Walters

Walters smuggles a whole national temperament into a single, acidic paradox: Americans admire intelligence the way they admire a fire extinguisher - essential in an emergency, suspect as a lifestyle. The line works because it frames intellect not as a stable civic good but as a situational weapon. When danger rises, smart people become indispensable technicians of survival: codebreakers, strategists, scientists, analysts. When the alarm quiets, the same capacity starts to look like arrogance, manipulation, or elitism. Intelligence shifts from shield to threat.

The subtext is military and bureaucratic. As a soldier and diplomat who lived through World War II, the Cold War, and the intelligence-state boom, Walters watched Washington’s appetite for brains spike during crises and sour during peacetime. His phrasing - “a lot of it” - sounds like procurement, not reverence: intelligence is inventory. Then comes the sharper turn: “somewhat immoral.” That’s not a casual insult; it points to a recurring American suspicion that thinking hard is a way of dodging honest labor, faith, or plain dealing. In this moral economy, the “smart” are often imagined as the ones who can rationalize anything, including betrayal.

Walters is also diagnosing a democratic insecurity. A culture built on equality can flinch at expertise because expertise implies hierarchy. So the country oscillates: it hires intellect to win wars and build markets, then punishes it socially for implying that not all opinions are equal. The irony is that a nation that prides itself on pragmatism keeps treating its most pragmatic resource as a vice.