Daily Inspiration Quote by Belva Lockwood

Lockwood isn’t selling naive faith in government; she’s drawing a hard boundary between what the state can and can’t do. “Abolish prejudice” names the private weather of a culture - habits, reflexes, contempt - and she concedes that statutes can’t rewrite hearts. The pivot matters: “but we can” shifts the argument from purity to power. If law can’t cleanse motives, it can still choreograph behavior. It can make discrimination costly, conspicuous, and less convenient. It can declare, in public, what a society is willing to tolerate.

The phrase “guidelines for our actions” is tactical and lawyerly. It’s modest on purpose, a way to smuggle a radical proposition past the usual backlash: equality doesn’t require that everyone like you; it requires that institutions stop punishing you. Lockwood’s subtext is that rights are lived through procedures - access, contracts, voting, employment, courtroom standing - the unglamorous machinery where prejudice does its most durable work.

Context sharpens the point. Lockwood built her career against a legal order that treated women as political minors, then became the first woman admitted to argue before the U.S. Supreme Court and ran for president in an era that barely recognized female civic personhood. For someone trained to read power where it hides, legislation isn’t moral theater. It’s infrastructure: the way a nation teaches itself new habits, one enforceable rule at a time.