Daily Inspiration Quote by Arthur Bryant

Bryant skewers power by aiming not at the statesman’s vanity but at the machinery that launders it into “history.” The “great ones” glide off to dinner - a crisp image of ease and entitlement - while the secretary remains behind, literally wasting away. “Growing thinner and thinner” is more than physical comedy; it’s an indictment of administrative life as a slow conversion of a person into a function, calories burned in service of other people’s self-importance.

The sentence’s real bite is its nested hall-of-mirrors: “what he thinks that they think that they ought to have thought.” Bryant stages governance as a game of second- and third-order mind-reading, where the record is no longer a description of events but a speculative reconstruction of the performance of wisdom. The secretary doesn’t capture decisions; he captures the version of decision-making the powerful want to appear to have had. That’s how reputations are manufactured: not by action, but by minutes, memos, and post-hoc coherence.

Context matters: Bryant was a historian of high politics, attracted to “great men” narratives even as he understood how curated they can be. This line reads like a moment of self-awareness from inside the historical trade. It acknowledges that what survives as “what happened” is often drafted by exhausted intermediaries who translate messy reality into legible greatness. Dinner, here, is the reward; the record is the burden. The joke lands because it’s not really a joke - it’s a description of how authority outsources both labor and, quietly, responsibility.