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Motherhood Quote by John Ashcroft

"If necessity is the mother of invention, it's the father of cooperation. And we're cooperating like never before"

About this Quote

Ashcroft’s line tries to smuggle an emergency into the warm language of civic virtue. By tweaking the familiar proverb, he performs a neat rhetorical handoff: necessity doesn’t just force improvisation (invention), it produces social unity (cooperation). The phrasing is almost domestic, even comforting, as if crisis were a family drama with productive parents rather than a political event with winners, losers, and rights at stake.

The subtext is where the work happens. “Necessity” is left undefined on purpose; it can mean terrorism, war, national insecurity, or any looming threat that justifies extraordinary measures. That vagueness is a feature, not a bug. If the necessity is unquestionable, then cooperation becomes a moral duty, and dissent can be recast as selfishness, softness, or disloyalty rather than a legitimate democratic function. The sentence converts compliance into community.

“And we’re cooperating like never before” lands as both boast and gentle warning. It implies momentum: institutions, agencies, citizens, maybe even allies, are already aligned, so resisting would mean stepping out of sync with history. Coming from a public servant closely associated with the post-9/11 security state, the likely context is a period when expanded surveillance, interagency information-sharing, and new federal powers were framed as not only necessary but unifying. The intent isn’t merely to celebrate coordination; it’s to pre-empt criticism by branding the entire apparatus of emergency governance as a collective project. Cooperation becomes the alibi.

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TopicTeamwork
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Ashcroft, John. (2026, January 16). If necessity is the mother of invention, it's the father of cooperation. And we're cooperating like never before. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/if-necessity-is-the-mother-of-invention-its-the-83710/

Chicago Style
Ashcroft, John. "If necessity is the mother of invention, it's the father of cooperation. And we're cooperating like never before." FixQuotes. January 16, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/if-necessity-is-the-mother-of-invention-its-the-83710/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"If necessity is the mother of invention, it's the father of cooperation. And we're cooperating like never before." FixQuotes, 16 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/if-necessity-is-the-mother-of-invention-its-the-83710/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.

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John Ashcroft

John Ashcroft (born May 9, 1942) is a Public Servant from USA.

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