Daily Inspiration Quote by John Burns

Burns is taking a swing at the politics of badges: party tags, class markers, fashionable ideologies, even the moral branding people use to announce virtue. Coming from a trade-union activist who rose into government, the line carries an insider-outsider edge. He knows how movements can get addicted to slogans and uniforms - literal and figurative - and he’s warning that identity can become a shortcut around accountability.

The phrasing matters. “Judge men less” doesn’t pretend labels are meaningless; it demotes them. Burns is realistic about how humans sort each other, but insists the real audit is behavioral and longitudinal: “persistent labour.” Not brilliance, not purity, not charisma - just the unglamorous stamina of work done repeatedly. It’s a rebuke to the romantic revolutionary and the self-satisfied reformer alike. The virtue he’s praising is boring on purpose.

Then comes the hard sell: “sure if slow progress.” Burns is defending incrementalism without calling it that. In an era of sharp class conflict and grand ideological promises, he’s making a case for results that arrive late but arrive. The subtext is both moral and strategic: movements win legitimacy not by winning the argument, but by improving lives in ways that can’t be faked.

Read against the late Victorian and interwar backdrop - strikes, expanding suffrage, municipal reform, fragile social welfare - the quote is almost a survival tactic. When politics becomes theater, Burns says, look for the people still doing the work after the applause dies down.