Daily Inspiration Quote by Ian Hacking

The line lands like a quiet corrective to the philosopher's occupational hazard: spending so long diagnosing human error that you start mistaking it for the whole story. Hacking isn't selling optimism. He's admitting how reasonable pessimism can feel in a world that supplies daily evidence for it, then slipping in a counterweight with almost scientific caution: "every once in a while". The phrase functions like a hedge in an academic paper, but emotionally it reads as earned restraint. Goodness, here, isn't constant; it's episodic, sometimes accidental, often noticed only in retrospect.

The subtext is epistemic as much as moral. "Makes you realise" frames decency as a revelation, not a principle. That matters coming from Hacking, whose work obsessed over how categories shape what we can see and say. The quote suggests that cynicism is a kind of default classification system: it organizes experience efficiently, especially in modern life where institutions, headlines, and incentives reward suspicion. Then an encounter (a stranger's patience, a bureaucrat's mercy, a community's competence) breaks the schema. Reality reasserts its messiness.

"Not quite as bad" is doing heavy lifting. It's anti-utopian, anti-sainthood, anti-ted-talk. People remain flawed; the world remains rough; the point is that our usual story about it is overly totalizing. The intent feels less like consolation than calibration: a reminder that the ethical imagination needs evidence too, and that small shocks of kindness can keep our theories from becoming a prison.