Daily Inspiration Quote by Jim Garrison

"I'm not in the business of harassing anybody" is the kind of line a public servant reaches for when power starts to look like pressure. Jim Garrison, the New Orleans district attorney who turned the Kennedy assassination into a personal crusade, understood that investigations don’t just produce facts; they produce feelings. Fear. Paranoia. Resentment. This sentence tries to launder coercion into civic duty by reframing intent as professionalism: I’m not doing this because I enjoy it, I’m doing it because it’s my job.

The subtext is defensive in a very specific way. It doesn’t deny that people feel harassed. It denies the motive. Garrison’s wording concedes the optics while insisting on purity of purpose, a rhetorical move that matters because harassment is often defined by experience, not by the harasser’s self-description. "Business" is doing extra work here: it suggests a rational, procedural enterprise, a bureaucracy of justice, not a vendetta. It also smuggles in the idea that outcomes are collateral to the mission.

In context, the line reads like preemptive damage control. Garrison’s investigations were controversial not just for their conclusions but for their methods and their appetite for spectacle. This quote aims to reclaim legitimacy by casting scrutiny as reluctant necessity. It works because it taps into a familiar democratic bargain: we tolerate the state’s intrusion when we believe it’s impersonal, rule-bound, and reluctant. The tragedy, and the tension, is how easily that posture can become a mask.