Daily Inspiration Quote by Charles Evans Hughes

A judge praising "hard work" is never just offering career advice; he is laying down an ethic of legitimacy. Hughes frames labor as both virtue and shield: if you keep grinding, you stay morally upright, socially credible, and supposedly safe from collapse. The line is built like a bench ruling - declarative, categorical, impatient with nuance. "I believe" reads almost religious, then comes the triplet: work, hard work, long hours. The repetition is its own gavel, turning effort into evidence.

The real move, though, is the pivot: people don't break from overwork, they break from "worry and dissipation". That is a convenient exoneration of institutions that demand punishing schedules. By redefining burnout as a character problem (anxiety) or a vice problem (dissipation), Hughes protects the ideal of productivity from inconvenient facts like fatigue, illness, or exploitation. It's also a class-coded swipe. "Dissipation" is the old vocabulary of moral panic: drink, nightlife, gambling, idleness - the behaviors respectable professionals can blame for suffering without interrogating the system that rewards self-erasure.

Context matters: Hughes came up in a period when American authority was being professionalized and sanctified - courts, corporations, bureaucracies - and "strenuous" self-discipline doubled as a story elites told to justify their power. The subtext is Calvinist capitalism with a jurist's confidence: if you're falling apart, it's not the workload; it's your weakness. That message still travels well in modern hustle culture, which loves to medicalize stress while moralizing rest.