Daily Inspiration Quote by Earl Butz

Practical, even folksy, this is the language of a bureaucrat trying to launder power into inevitability. Earl Butz isn’t offering wisdom so much as a preemptive defense: decision-making is hard, errors are normal, so stop asking for purity. It’s a neat rhetorical move because it shifts the audience’s role from judge to sympathetic onlooker. If you accept the premise, accountability starts to feel like cruelty.

The line works by smuggling in a hierarchy. “You’ve got to make choices” implies a world where leaders are burdened with necessity while everyone else enjoys the luxury of critique. “You’re not going to be right all the time” sounds humble, but it’s also a request for indulgence: if wrongness is guaranteed, then being wrong becomes less a failure than a tax paid for action. The subtext is permission, not reflection.

Coming from Butz, a high-profile U.S. Secretary of Agriculture associated with the industrial turn in farming policy, the quote sits in a context where “choices” weren’t abstract. They shaped land use, consolidation, rural livelihoods, and the food system’s long tail of consequences. That’s why the simplicity is strategic. It’s a one-size-fits-all absolution that treats systemic outcomes as the unavoidable byproduct of tough calls, not the result of values, incentives, and beneficiaries.

It’s also a reminder of how public servants often talk when the record is messy: flatten moral complexity into managerial realism, and hope the public mistakes resignation for honesty.