Daily Inspiration Quote by Jacques Barzun

Nothing gums up a meeting faster than someone reaching for the moral high ground. Barzun, the great schoolman with a historian’s nose for how institutions really behave, isn’t taking a cheap shot at “principles” so much as diagnosing their tactical power. In an assembly, “business” implies negotiation, trade-offs, the unglamorous work of deciding who gets what and when. A principle arrives like a foghorn: it changes the game from bargaining to belief.

The line is a miniature lesson in escalation. Practical questions admit compromises; principled questions demand allegiance. Once a dispute is framed as right versus wrong, each side is pressured to harden. To yield isn’t just to lose a point, it’s to betray an identity. That’s how a room “split[s] the ranks”: not because people suddenly think more clearly, but because the incentives shift toward signaling purity over solving problems.

Barzun’s subtext is also a quiet critique of modern institutional rhetoric, especially in education and public life where committees and boards pretend to be rational engines. Principle-talk can be sincere, but it’s rarely innocent. It can be used to stall, to grandstand, to recruit a faction, or to force others into an awkward posture: who wants to be the person arguing against “integrity” or “freedom”?

Read in context of Barzun’s lifelong skepticism about bureaucratic culture, the quote doubles as advice and warning. Principles matter; weaponizing them is a reliable way to ensure nothing gets done while everyone feels heroic.