Daily Inspiration Quote by Phyllis Schlafly

“Location” reads like a neutral business truism, but in Schlafly’s mouth it doubles as a worldview: legitimacy is rooted, earned in place, and protected by staying put. The line borrows the language of entrepreneurship to smuggle in a social argument about belonging. It flatters the local striver - the shopkeeper, the builder, the professional with a name on the door - and implies that reputation isn’t a transferable credential so much as a community compact. You’re vouched for because people have seen you, tracked you, and can punish you socially if you cheat.

That’s the subtext: mobility can look like evasion. If reputations are “built at a particular spot,” then outsiders, transplants, and distant institutions arrive already suspect. It’s a tidy defense of local authority against abstract power, the kind of framing that converts politics into common sense economics. Schlafly, as a conservative activist who made her career mobilizing suburban and small-town networks (and resisting elite, national reforms), knew the rhetorical advantage of making cultural arguments sound like practical advice.

The sentence also signals how power actually works in her universe: not primarily through credentials or ideas, but through embedded relationships. It’s a reminder that “entrepreneur” here isn’t just a market actor; it’s a moral character in a neighborhood drama. The effect is to turn geography into a proxy for trust - and to suggest that the people most entitled to steer a community are the ones who can point to an address and say, I’ve been here.