Daily Inspiration Quote by Jimmy Breslin

“Immediate lacerations of the credibility” is Breslin doing what he did best: taking the dead-eyed language of institutions and forcing it to bleed. The phrase is built like a police report or legal memo - “complainant received” is bureaucratic passive voice, the kind that pretends events happen without anyone doing them. Then he yanks the rug by swapping the expected noun (“lacerations of the face”) for a moral injury: credibility. It’s funny because it’s wrong in exactly the right way. Credibility can’t be cut, but in public life it absolutely can be torn open, quickly, and with real consequences.

The specific intent is to mock the way official systems launder human mess into sanitized syntax. Breslin compresses an entire scandal cycle into six words: someone speaks up; the machine responds not by addressing harm, but by wounding the speaker’s believability. “Immediate” matters - it’s not a slow, considered evaluation, it’s reflex. That’s the tell.

The subtext is sharper than the joke: the first punishment for making a complaint is often reputational. Before facts are weighed, the complainant is weighed - their tone, past, class, accent, sobriety, “story.” Breslin’s phrasing mimics authority to expose authority’s real function: not truth-seeking, but damage control.

Contextually, it slots into Breslin’s New York worldview, where power speaks in euphemism and the street hears the threat underneath. He’s translating the violence of discrediting into bodily harm, because that’s what it feels like when the system turns its spotlight on you.