Daily Inspiration Quote by Learned Hand

Hand’s line lands like a judicial quip with a bruise underneath it: democracy may be clumsy, even vulgar, but the alternatives are violent. By borrowing Dean Inge (an arch, skeptical Anglican intellect), Hand gives himself a sly ally in condescension. “Counting heads” reduces citizens to arithmetic, the kind of procedural thinning that elites love to mock. Then he snaps the reader back to stakes with “breaking them,” a phrase that turns politics into bone and police batons. The joke is doing moral work: it makes majority rule sound like the least embarrassing option precisely because every other option sounds like a crime scene.

The specific intent is not to romanticize democracy but to defend it against the perennial temptation toward “efficient” governance. Hand, a judge shaped by the 20th century’s authoritarian disasters, is arguing from the bench of history: when leaders stop tolerating the indignities of disagreement, they start reaching for coercion. The subtext is a warning aimed at the confident reformer and the impatient strongman alike. He’s conceding the critique (majorities can be wrong; elections can be crude) to disarm it, then insisting that legitimacy matters because it is the alternative to force.

Contextually, it fits Hand’s larger civil-libertarian sensibility: law is supposed to be a substitute for violence, not a mask for it. The line works because it refuses to sell democracy as sacred; it sells it as the bargain that keeps bodies intact.