Skip to main content

Daily Inspiration Quote by George Weinberg

"I felt like an apostle of the obvious and people imagined that I was doing something daring"

About this Quote

There’s a sly, almost weary comedy in Weinberg casting himself as “an apostle of the obvious” while everyone else treats him like a bomb-thrower. The line works because it reveals a common dynamic in social change: the idea that feels self-evident to anyone with basic empathy can register as radical when an institution has built its legitimacy on not seeing it.

Weinberg, a psychologist best known for helping popularize the term “homophobia,” is pointing at the gap between moral clarity and cultural readiness. “Apostle” gives the sentence a sharp edge: he’s not claiming genius, he’s claiming testimony. He’s bearing witness to something plain, then watching society respond as if he’s smuggling contraband. That’s not humility so much as an indictment of the room. If saying “maybe the problem isn’t gay people, maybe it’s prejudice” counts as daring, the culture’s baseline has already been exposed as brittle and defensive.

The subtext is also about professional risk. Mid-century psychology and psychiatry often dressed bias up as diagnosis, treating homosexuality as pathology and prejudice as invisible. In that context, insisting on the “obvious” wasn’t just common sense; it was a threat to a whole apparatus of expertise, funding, and social permission. Weinberg’s punchline lands because it captures how power works: it calls the simplest truths “controversial” to make dissent look like extremism, and then congratulates itself for tolerating the “daring” person who merely stated what should never have needed saying.

Quote Details

TopicTruth
SourceHelp us find the source
More Quotes by George Add to List
Apostle of the Obvious and Doing Something Daring - George Weinberg
Click to enlarge Portrait | Landscape

About the Author

USA Flag

George Weinberg (1929 - 2017) was a Psychologist from USA.

33 more quotes available

View Profile

Similar Quotes