Daily Inspiration Quote by Don DeLillo

DeLillo’s line lands like a warning delivered in a deadpan voice: the State doesn’t just govern; it daydreams at industrial scale, then builds those dreams into policy, architecture, spectacle. “Massive fantasies” is doing the real work here. It’s not accusing the State of simple lying or propaganda; it’s pointing to a deeper, almost novelistic drive to narrate reality into a shape that flatters power. Governments don’t merely respond to events - they script them, cast heroes and villains, assign motives, and stage outcomes that make their authority feel inevitable.

The subtext is DeLillo’s enduring obsession: modern life is mediated by systems so large they start to feel metaphysical. The State, in his world, competes with corporations and media to own the story. “Never underestimate” carries an admonition aimed at the complacent citizen who assumes bureaucracy is boring and therefore limited. DeLillo flips that assumption. Boredom is camouflage; the machinery’s most consequential moves often arrive packaged as procedure.

Context matters: writing in the shadow of the Cold War, mass surveillance, and the televised choreography of war and catastrophe, DeLillo tracks how collective fear becomes a resource. A State fantasy can be utopian (security, order, national destiny) or apocalyptic (permanent emergency), but either way it scales: it recruits budgets, laws, data, and bodies. The line works because it’s cynical without being nihilistic; it insists that power has imagination - and that imagination, unchallenged, becomes infrastructure.