Daily Inspiration Quote by Gloria Steinem

Steinem’s line lands like a pin in an overinflated moral identity: everyone, across the spectrum, wants the clean self-image of opposing violence. The twist is the “cherished case” - a phrase that drips with intimacy and hypocrisy. It suggests our exceptions aren’t reluctant, last-resort compromises; they’re treasured stories we cradle because they let us feel principled while keeping our preferred weapons on the table.

The intent is less to scold “violent people” than to expose how violence survives by laundering itself through ethics. Pacifists can sanctify force as “self-defense.” Revolutionaries can elevate it as “liberation.” States can baptize it as “security.” Steinem collapses these rationales into the same psychological maneuver: condemnation as branding, exception as permission. The quote works because it refuses the comforting binary - good nonviolent people vs bad violent people - and instead indicts the shared architecture of justification.

Context matters: Steinem, writing and speaking out of feminist activism, watched public discourse excuse some harms while moralizing others. Domestic abuse, sexual violence, and state coercion were often minimized or rendered private, while “legitimate” violence (war, policing, punishment) retained civic prestige. Her spectrum, “from pacifist to terrorist,” is deliberately abrasive, not to equate their actions, but to show the continuity of self-justification that can scale from a personal grievance to an ideology.

The subtext is a warning: if your ethics include a “cherished” loophole, you’re not against violence. You’re just curating it.