Daily Inspiration Quote by Albert Ellis

Ellis gives you a bracing kind of permission slip: not to excuse unfairness, but to stop treating it like a cosmic malfunction. The line is engineered to pry apart two impulses we habitually fuse - moral judgment and metaphysical outrage. "Unfair" names the injury plainly; "they have the right" sounds provocative until you hear the clinical intent behind it. Ellis is not granting moral legitimacy. He's stripping away the demand that reality must line up with our internal rulebook.

The subtext is pure REBT (his signature approach): suffering multiplies when we upgrade preferences into musts. You can want people to be just, decent, consistent - and still recognize that insisting they must be turns every disappointment into an existential crisis. Calling people "fallible, screwed-up humans" is deliberately blunt, almost comic, a corrective to the dignified language we use to dress up our resentments. It refuses the fantasy that someone else's fairness is owed to you by the universe.

Context matters: Ellis built a career arguing against the tyranny of "should". This quote carries that anti-should ethos into everyday conflict. It also sneaks in a hard boundary: accepting unfairness as part of the human condition is not the same as tolerating it. You can contest it, leave the relationship, report the boss, vote accordingly. What Ellis wants to amputate is the extra layer of suffering - the belief that unfairness is unbearable because it is abnormal. The paradox is the point: acceptance becomes the precondition for effective action, not surrender.