Daily Inspiration Quote by Don Marquis

A neat little absolution wrapped in a shrug: if an idea can’t be held accountable for its followers, then the mess belongs to the humans and the humans alone. Don Marquis, a journalist with a satirist’s instinct for puncturing moral vanity, is aiming at a common dodge in public life: the impulse to treat beliefs like autonomous forces, as if they “make” people do things. His line refuses that comfort. It yanks responsibility back from abstractions and drops it in the lap of the believer.

The subtext is sharper than it first appears. Marquis isn’t just defending ideas against guilt-by-association; he’s mocking the way people weaponize purity tests. We do this constantly: discredit a philosophy by pointing to its worst disciples, or excuse our own side by insisting the bad actors “misunderstood” the doctrine. Marquis cuts through both maneuvers. An idea, he implies, is inert until someone animates it. The ethics begin at adoption: what you select, how you interpret, what you’re willing to justify in its name.

The context matters. Marquis wrote in an era of booming mass media, political movements hardening into ideologies, and propaganda learning to scale. Journalism was watching crowds form around slogans, and watching leaders hide behind them. The sentence reads like a warning to readers and a rebuke to demagogues: stop blaming the script. The actor chose the role, delivered the lines, and took the applause.