Daily Inspiration Quote by Harry Emerson Fosdick

Democracy, in Fosdick's framing, isn’t a procedure; it’s a wager on human capacity. Coming from a prominent Protestant clergyman of the early 20th century, the line reads like a sermon aimed at civic life: faith, but translated into institutions. The key move is the phrase "conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people". He’s not praising “the people” as they are; he’s insisting on what they could become if treated as agents rather than subjects. That’s an explicitly moral claim disguised as political common sense.

The subtext carries both uplift and warning. "Conviction" implies democracy survives on belief as much as on laws. If citizens and leaders stop expecting growth, judgment, and decency from the average person, the system hollows out into bureaucracy or strongman rule. By emphasizing "ordinary", Fosdick pushes back against the era’s competing temptations: technocracy, which treats expertise as a substitute for consent, and elitism, which treats the masses as a problem to manage. His theology of individual worth becomes a political antidote to cynicism.

Context matters: Fosdick preached through world wars, the Great Depression, and rising authoritarianism. In that climate, it’s not naive optimism; it’s rhetorical resistance. The sentence works because it flatters the listener just enough to recruit them, then quietly assigns homework: if democracy rests on your “possibilities,” you’re obligated to develop them - through education, participation, and the discipline of living with people who don’t share your views.