Daily Inspiration Quote by Susan George

“Everything has to be done” is deliberately totalizing language: not a policy suggestion, a moral demand. Susan George, a longtime critic of debt regimes, trade orthodoxy, and the architecture of global finance, is pointing at a problem that national democracies keep running into like a glass wall: power has gone global, accountability has not. The sentence works because it flips the usual story. We’re told globalization is inevitable, technocratic, basically weather. George treats it as a political design choice that can be redesigned.

“Some sort of international democracy” is also carefully modest. She’s not selling a tidy blueprint or a utopia; she’s acknowledging that the form is contested and unfinished. That vagueness is strategic: it invites a coalition broader than any one institutional fix (a stronger UN, transnational parliaments, binding human-rights courts, democratic control of the IMF/WTO) while keeping the core claim intact: decisions that shape billions of lives should not be made by insulated elites, creditor blocs, or corporate lobby networks.

The second line, “We’ve seen only the tiniest beginnings of that,” carries the subtext of frustration with symbolic participation masquerading as governance: summits with civil-society side events, consultation without veto power, transparency without teeth. It also signals a long view. George is writing in the aftermath of late-20th-century neoliberal consolidation, when capital and supply chains leapt borders faster than democratic institutions could follow. The quote’s intent is to reframe democratic ambition at the same scale as the crises it’s meant to handle: debt, climate, migration, war, and the market rules that quietly legislate all of them.