Daily Inspiration Quote by Finley Peter Dunne

A good newspaper is a two-way irritant: balm for the people getting crushed, sandpaper for the people doing the crushing. Finley Peter Dunne, writing as the Chicago-bred bartender-philosopher Mr. Dooley, distilled an entire theory of journalism into a line that still stings because it refuses neutrality as a moral pose. The verbs do the work. "Comfort" isn’t sentimental; it’s a promise of attention, credibility, and protection for those whose stories are usually discounted. "Afflict" isn’t cruelty; it’s pressure, exposure, and inconvenience applied to power.

The subtext is a quiet indictment of the default setting of public life: comfort accumulates at the top, affliction at the bottom. Dunne’s joke is that a paper can either mirror that arrangement or reverse it. The phrase also smuggles in a warning to journalists themselves. If you find your work making the comfortable more comfortable - polishing reputations, laundering euphemisms, treating access as virtue - you’ve stopped doing the job and started doing PR.

Context matters: Dunne came of age in the rough-edged, immigrant-heavy politics of turn-of-the-century Chicago, when machines, moguls, and moral crusaders all competed to control the narrative. Mr. Dooley’s humor let Dunne say impolite things in a voice that sounded like common sense. That’s why the line endures. It frames journalism not as a temperament (detached, "objective") but as an ethical stance: side with the vulnerable, interrogate the powerful, and accept that someone with money and influence should end the day a little less at ease.