"For some reason, it never crossed any mind in this administration to ask for the money back"
About this Quote
The line lands like an accountant's punchline delivered in a courtroom: dry, clipped, and devastating precisely because it pretends to be merely procedural. Schuyler isn't railing about abstract corruption; he's indicting a governing reflex so normalized that the most basic question in public stewardship - where did the money go, and can we recover it? - never even appears on the agenda. The insult is in the phrasing: "for some reason" is a weaponized shrug, a way of saying the reason is obvious and ugly, but the speaker is too disciplined (or too politically savvy) to spell it out.
As a colonial-era politician, Schuyler is writing from a world where "administration" often meant patronage networks, contracts awarded to friends, and public funds treated as lubricant for loyalty. His choice of "any mind" widens the blast radius. This isn't a single bad actor; it's a culture of incuriosity, a bureaucratic groupthink where the absence of oversight isn't a mistake but an unspoken agreement. The real accusation: you don't ask for the money back when you already know who has it - and you can't afford to make them your enemy.
What makes the sentence work is its modern feel. It reads like today's postmortems after a boondoggle: not anger at the theft alone, but disbelief at the laziness of governance. Schuyler frames accountability not as a lofty moral demand, but as the most elementary step, and the fact that it "never crossed" their minds is the clearest evidence of how power protects itself.
As a colonial-era politician, Schuyler is writing from a world where "administration" often meant patronage networks, contracts awarded to friends, and public funds treated as lubricant for loyalty. His choice of "any mind" widens the blast radius. This isn't a single bad actor; it's a culture of incuriosity, a bureaucratic groupthink where the absence of oversight isn't a mistake but an unspoken agreement. The real accusation: you don't ask for the money back when you already know who has it - and you can't afford to make them your enemy.
What makes the sentence work is its modern feel. It reads like today's postmortems after a boondoggle: not anger at the theft alone, but disbelief at the laziness of governance. Schuyler frames accountability not as a lofty moral demand, but as the most elementary step, and the fact that it "never crossed" their minds is the clearest evidence of how power protects itself.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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