Daily Inspiration Quote by Robert Reich

A line like this works because it sounds modest while carrying a hard-edged boundary: the state does not get to police intimacy. Reich frames the issue in the language of jurisdiction rather than morality, and that choice is strategic. “Business” is a deliberately transactional word from an economist-politician’s toolkit; it recasts government as a service provider with limited scope, not a parent, priest, or cultural referee. The sentence also does an elegant bit of rhetorical shrinking: “private bedrooms” narrows a sprawling set of contested questions (sex, marriage, contraception, LGBTQ rights) into a single, vivid scene most people instinctively want protected. You can disagree about values and still feel, in your gut, that officials shouldn’t be there.

The subtext is a rebuke to a certain kind of governance-by-disgust: laws that claim public purpose but are fueled by private revulsion. By emphasizing privacy, Reich leans on a liberal tradition that treats autonomy as a civic virtue, not an indulgence. He’s also building a coalition across ideology. Libertarians hear “get the government out,” social moderates hear “live and let live,” and even many conservatives recognize the appeal of keeping policing power out of the home.

Contextually, the phrase belongs to the late-20th-century fights over sodomy laws, abortion, and “family values” legislation, when politicians tried to turn personal behavior into a proxy for national decline. Reich’s intent is to puncture that maneuver: if the state can regulate bedrooms, it can regulate anything, and the precedent is the point.