Leadership Quote by Morarji Desai

Desai’s line has the clipped caution of a statesman who knows the quickest way to lose an audience is to sound like he’s lecturing them about biology. He waves off the “physical reasons” not because they’re irrelevant, but because arguments about anatomy quickly turn into amateur science and partisan heckling. The real target is moral rationalization: the uniquely human talent for dressing appetite up as principle.

The subtext is a quiet accusation. If you want to eat meat, exploit someone, cut a corner, Desai implies, you can always hire your own conscience as a defense attorney. Intelligence becomes less a beacon than a tool kit for self-exoneration. That’s a sharper critique than it first appears, because it doesn’t attack a single practice; it attacks the mental maneuver that makes any practice feel justified. He’s pointing at the loophole factory inside the human mind.

The political context matters. Desai’s public life was built on austerity, discipline, and a kind of moral absolutism associated with Gandhian ethics. In that tradition, the fight isn’t merely against vice; it’s against the stories we tell ourselves to keep vice looking like virtue. Read as a warning to citizens and officials alike, the line doubles as anti-corruption rhetoric: wrongdoing rarely arrives announcing itself. It arrives with reasons, footnotes, and a perfectly competent argument for why “this time” doesn’t count.