Daily Inspiration Quote by Murray Kempton

Kempton’s line flatters our worst instincts while pretending to diagnose them. “No great scoundrel is ever uninteresting” is a journalist’s confession: the villain is catnip, not despite the damage but because of it. The word “great” does double duty. It doesn’t excuse the scoundrel; it elevates him into narrative scale. A petty crook is just a crime blotter item. A “great” scoundrel has ambition, style, a theory of himself - the stuff that creates scenes, quotes, and consequences. Kempton is admitting that charisma and menace share an electrical circuit.

The subtext is about the press as much as the criminal. Journalists sell attention, and attention loves transgression with a plot. “Uninteresting” is the key tell: Kempton isn’t measuring morality, he’s measuring readability. That’s a bracingly unsentimental standard, and it’s also a quiet warning about how public life gets scripted. If we can’t look away from the scoundrel, we start organizing politics and culture around him: the spectacle becomes the story; the story becomes the stakes.

Kempton wrote in an American century that mass media increasingly rewarded big personalities - bosses, demagogues, celebrity grifters, beautifully spoken liars. The sentence lands because it’s compact, cynical, and uncomfortably accurate about the marketplace of attention: virtue often bores, but vice knows how to pace itself.