Daily Inspiration Quote by Dorothy Denning

A careful hedge opens the door: "However" signals Denning isn’t preaching dogma, she’s correcting an overreach. The line is engineered to puncture a familiar modern reflex - that markets are nature, not policy. By adding "not necessarily", she avoids the caricature of anti-capitalist sermonizing and instead adopts a public servant’s posture: pragmatic, case-based, allergic to absolutes. It’s a small rhetorical move with a big payoff, because it invites agreement from people who like markets but don’t want to live in a world run entirely by them.

The subtext is about what markets systematically ignore. Prices register willingness and ability to pay, not the value of privacy, resilience, fairness, or long-term stability. In Denning’s wheelhouse - information security, surveillance, and digital governance - the critique hits harder. Cybersecurity is the classic market failure: the harms of a breach spill onto everyone, while the incentives to cut corners are concentrated inside a firm’s quarterly calculus. The market rewards speed and scale; it rarely rewards "boring" safeguards until after catastrophe.

"Good for society" is doing stealth work here, too. It shifts the unit of measurement from consumer choice to collective consequence: infrastructure that must not fail, rights that shouldn’t be auctioned, and vulnerabilities that compound when left to private optimization. Denning’s sentence doesn’t ask for the end of markets; it argues for the legitimacy of limits. It’s a technologist’s warning translated into civic language: if we treat every public good like a commodity, we shouldn’t be surprised when the bill arrives as systemic risk.