Daily Inspiration Quote by Alexander Woollcott

Woollcott’s line is a scalpel disguised as a shrug. By yoking Hitler to the Chicago Tribune, he mocks a certain lazy moral accounting: the urge to blame an entire nation for the monster it produced, as if “Germany” were a single, coherent mind that woke up one day and chose fascism. His analogy insists on categories. Chicago doesn’t author the Tribune’s editorials; it supplies the conditions that make the paper possible - money, readership, institutions, grievances, appetites. Responsibility is real, but it’s diffuse, mediated, and often laundered through respectable mechanisms.

The barb lands because it’s both deflationary and accusatory. Deflationary, in that it punctures the satisfying simplicity of collective guilt. Accusatory, because it refuses to let the broader ecosystem off the hook, either. Cities get the papers they will subsidize; societies get demagogues they can elevate, tolerate, or fail to stop. The joke is that “not responsible” can sound like exoneration, but Woollcott is really describing complicity at scale: a public sphere that incubates power while reserving the right to act shocked by the result.

In context, Woollcott is writing in the shadow of the interwar and early WWII years, when Americans argued over whether Germans were uniquely culpable or merely tragically captured. He answers with a critic’s instinct: stop mythologizing nations, start interrogating the machinery - media, elites, public consent - that turns a man into history.