Daily Inspiration Quote by Samuel E. Morison

Consensus is cheap until it has to cash out in definitions. Morison’s line skewers a familiar civic ritual: we all nod along to “truth” as a virtue, a goal, even a national brand - right up to the moment someone asks, “Okay, whose truth, backed by what standards?” Then the room divides, not because people suddenly stop caring about truth, but because “truth” has been doing double duty as a moral badge and a methodological claim.

Coming from a working historian, the intent is pointed. Morison isn’t romanticizing skepticism; he’s diagnosing the friction between shared ideals and the messy machinery required to sustain them: evidence, archives, corroboration, and the uncomfortable fact that sources are partial and power-laden. The subtext is a warning against rhetorical shortcuts. Invoking truth can function as social glue - a way to end arguments by appealing to something supposedly above politics. Defining truth, though, forces you to reveal your epistemology: do you trust documents, eyewitnesses, institutions, statistics, lived experience? What counts as proof, and who gets to authenticate it?

The context is a 20th-century world where mass media, propaganda, and professionalized scholarship collide. Historians like Morison were negotiating between public appetite for clean narratives and the discipline’s insistence on complexity. His sentence works because it frames dissension not as a failure of character but as an inevitability of precision. Agreement lives at the level of slogans; definition is where accountability begins.