Daily Inspiration Quote by Lion Feuchtwanger

Feuchtwanger is cutting a neat trapdoor under the smug floors of “reason.” In two balanced sentences, he refuses the lazy shortcut that treats logic as a moral disinfectant. The first clause pushes back against the modern compulsion to audit every human choice like a spreadsheet: feelings, loyalties, and cultural instincts may be coherent to a life even when they’re not formally “logical.” The second clause is the sharper blade. It anticipates the bureaucrat, the ideologue, the courtroom mind: people who can build airtight arguments for ugly outcomes and then mistake the elegance of the argument for ethical legitimacy.

The quote works because it doesn’t romanticize irrationality; it rejects a false equivalence. Feuchtwanger separates three things we constantly mash together: rationality (internal consistency), logic (a method), and rightness (a value judgment). That separation matters most in the century he lived through, when mass politics and propaganda industrialized “reasoning” into a weapon. Totalitarian systems excel at producing logic: scapegoats identified, costs tallied, “necessary” measures justified. Feuchtwanger, a Jewish German novelist who confronted nationalism and authoritarianism, knew how quickly a chain of premises can become a chain of custody for cruelty.

Subtext: stop outsourcing conscience to coherence. If an action feels humane but can’t be perfectly defended, that doesn’t convict it. If an action is perfectly defensible, that doesn’t acquit it. The line is a warning to intellectual vanity: being able to argue something is not the same as being right about it.