Daily Inspiration Quote by William Ralph Inge

A cleric reaching for barnyard cynicism is rarely doing it for pastoral charm. Inge’s line is a cold sermon about power dressed up as a joke: the sheep can hold all the virtuous meetings they want, adopt the right language, even congratulate themselves for moral progress, but none of it binds the wolf. The punch lands because “vegetarianism” isn’t just dietary preference here; it’s the fantasy that predation can be negotiated away by committee.

The intent is bracingly anti-sentimental. Inge is warning against the comforting belief that good intentions, consensus, or ethical posturing can substitute for leverage. The sheep’s “resolutions” are political theater: procedural, polite, and completely irrelevant to the actor who actually controls the outcome. The wolf’s “different opinion” is a masterstroke of understatement, reducing violence to mere dissent. That’s where the bite is: the quote mocks the liberal tendency (in the broad, temperament sense) to treat conflicts of interest as misunderstandings, solvable through statements and shared values.

Contextually, Inge lived through an era when Europe’s institutions discovered how flimsy paper safeguards can be against determined force: imperial rivalry, World War I, the rise of totalitarian politics, and the interwar faith in diplomacy that often arrived without enforcement. Coming from a clergyman, it also reads as a critique of moralism unaccompanied by strategy. Ethics, Inge implies, don’t become reality because the vulnerable vote for them; they become reality when the powerful are compelled to comply.