Daily Inspiration Quote by Fred Korematsu

The line lands with the quiet force of someone who learned, the hard way, how expensive silence can be. Fred Korematsu isn’t offering vague motivational advice; he’s issuing a practical warning from inside the machinery of state power. In 1942, he refused the U.S. government’s order that Japanese Americans report for removal and incarceration. That refusal made him a criminal in the eyes of his country and, later, a symbol of civic courage. When he says “If you have the feeling that something is wrong,” he’s validating a kind of moral intelligence that often shows up before you have perfect language, legal arguments, or social permission.

The genius of the sentence is its modesty. “Feeling” sounds soft, even unreliable, but in Korematsu’s context it becomes the first alarm bell when institutions normalize injustice. The subtext: your unease is not just personal anxiety; it may be your conscience noticing the gap between what a society claims to be and what it’s doing. “Speak up” is similarly plain, which is the point. He’s not romanticizing protest. He’s naming the smallest actionable step that can interrupt complicity.

Calling Korematsu a “celebrity” misses what makes the quote work culturally: he’s famous because the government was wrong, the Supreme Court largely backed it, and ordinary people were pressured to comply. The line is a reminder that legality and legitimacy are not synonyms, and that the first dissent often starts as an unfashionable hunch.