Daily Inspiration Quote by Dean Acheson

Politics has a short memory and a long appetite for legitimacy. Acheson’s line captures how yesterday’s outrage becomes today’s tradition once power, paperwork, and repetition do their work. “Controversial proposals” aren’t redeemed by moral revelation; they’re domesticated. The moment an idea is “accepted” - passed, funded, staffed, and routinized - it starts generating its own constituency and its own story about why it was inevitable all along. The fight drains out of it, leaving behind a monument.

Acheson, a central architect of the postwar American order (NATO, containment, the security state’s expansion), knew this dynamic from the inside. Many of those initiatives were pitched as emergency measures, derided as overreach, or attacked as reckless internationalism. Once they proved durable, they acquired the glow of necessity and even virtue. The subtext is slightly mordant: “hallowed” is religious language, suggesting reverence that can be reflexive rather than earned. Institutions don’t just survive; they sanctify themselves.

The intent isn’t merely to reassure reformers that pushback is temporary, though it does that. It’s also a warning about how quickly democratic argument hardens into civic catechism. If acceptance turns proposals into sacred cows, then scrutiny becomes impiety, and politics slips from debate into ritual. Acheson is naming a cycle: controversy, consolidation, canonization - and the quiet danger that canonization hides the contingency, tradeoffs, and power plays that built the policy in the first place.