Daily Inspiration Quote by Sydney J. Harris

Democracy, in Harris's telling, is less a warm-and-fuzzy ideal than a nuisance with a ballot box: a system designed to heckle authority on a schedule. The line lands because it reframes democracy's core virtue as suspicion, not serenity. It "persists" - a word that flatters no one. Persistence implies nagging, institutionalized doubt, the refusal to let power settle into the comfortable certainty that it deserves itself.

The pivot from "powers that be" to "powers that ought to be" is the quote's neat moral trap. The first phrase is pure description: who currently holds the levers. The second drags in legitimacy, competence, and consent. Harris isn't pretending elections automatically produce good leaders; he's praising the mechanism that keeps asking whether the current arrangement is defensible. Subtext: any system that stops asking that question has already started sliding toward self-justifying rule, whether it calls itself a monarchy, a party-state, or a "temporary emergency" government.

As a mid-century American journalist, Harris wrote in a period when democracy was being sold as civilizational branding - against fascism, then communism - even as domestic institutions wrestled with civil rights, McCarthyism, and an expanding national-security state. The quote reads like a corrective to propaganda-by-halo: democracy isn't righteous because it wears the label, it's righteous when it retains the capacity to interrogate itself. That insistence on accountability is also a warning. If citizens stop demanding an answer to "ought", democracy becomes a costume worn by the "powers that be."