Daily Inspiration Quote by Elihu Root

Root’s line reads like a lawyerly reality check aimed at the era’s most seductive fantasy: that you can design a “control” system powerful enough to manage society and still expect the people running it to behave like saints. The key move is his conditional. Human nature would have to be “much nearer perfection” to keep prejudice, selfishness, ambition, and injustice out of the machinery. That’s not a gloomy shrug; it’s a brief against concentrated authority.

The intent is cautionary, almost prophylactic. Root stacks four vices in a neat, prosecutorial cadence, turning individual moral flaws into predictable institutional hazards. In subtext, he’s attacking the progressive-era confidence that expert administration, commissions, or international arrangements could be insulated from ordinary human drives. The word “exclude” is doing heavy lifting: he assumes these impulses don’t merely intrude, they inevitably seep in wherever power offers reward, status, or cover.

Context matters. Root lived through Gilded Age political bargaining, imperial expansion, and the early architecture of the modern administrative state. As a statesman-lawyer (Secretary of War, Secretary of State, Nobel Peace Prize), he helped build institutions while warning about their failure modes. The line lands as a constitutionalist argument without the pieties: checks and balances exist not because citizens are wicked, but because they are reliably human. It’s a sober rebuke to utopian governance, delivered in the cool tone of someone who has watched idealistic systems get quietly repurposed by the very motives they promised to rise above.