Daily Inspiration Quote by Elliot Richardson

The line draws its blade with a clean, lawyerly contrast: "you" treat the state as a creature with its own hungers; "we" treat it as paperwork. Richardson isn’t romanticizing democracy so much as prosecuting a rival philosophy of government. By personifying the state on the other side as an "entity with purposes of its own", he frames statism as a kind of idolatry: citizens reduced to instruments, public life reorganized around serving an abstract power that claims to know what it wants.

Then he flips the metaphysics. For "us", the state isn’t a thing at all, just "a label" for delegated responsibility. That word choice is doing heavy work. A label can be peeled off; it doesn’t confer sacredness. It’s also a subtle rebuke to bureaucratic self-importance: agencies and officials aren’t a separate moral actor, merely temporary stand-ins tasked with handling shared problems. The phrase "we the people" deliberately echoes the Constitution, tethering legitimacy to consent and limiting government to a functional role.

The subtext is a warning about mission creep. If the state is imagined as having interests independent of citizens, it starts to justify demands that feel like duty rather than choice: obedience, sacrifice, silence. If it’s merely an arrangement, it remains contestable and revisable. Coming from a mid-century American lawyer who moved through the upper floors of government, the argument also reads as insider discipline: a reminder, aimed at both ideological opponents and fellow officials, that public authority is borrowed, not owned.