Life & Wisdom Quote by William Feather

Feather’s line is a moral argument wearing an accountant’s visor. He doesn’t ask you to oppose injustice because it’s ugly (though it is); he reframes it as a bad investment, an engine of inefficiency. That rhetorical move matters because it targets the audience most likely to shrug at ethical appeals: employers, policymakers, and comfortable bystanders who treat “fairness” as optional but hate the smell of squandered money.

The phrase “not only cruel” concedes the obvious, then pivots to the leverage point. “Economic waste” is deliberately blunt, almost industrial. It collapses the distance between a harmed person and a harmed balance sheet, implying that discrimination doesn’t just injure its victims; it degrades the whole system by misallocating talent, depressing demand, and forcing entire communities into underuse. In that subtext is a quiet rebuke: if your conscience won’t move you, maybe your self-interest will.

Contextually, Feather wrote in a 20th-century America where the language of productivity, growth, and managerial “common sense” increasingly dominated public life. The Progressive era, the Depression, wartime mobilization, and postwar prosperity all trained citizens to think in terms of national output and human capital, even when talking about social policy. Feather taps that vocabulary to smuggle an ethical claim into the boardroom.

The line’s sharpest implication is also its most unsettling: a society should not need profit-loss framing to reject cruelty. Yet Feather’s realism lands. He’s arguing that injustice is not merely a sin; it’s a self-inflicted wound with receipts.