Daily Inspiration Quote by Ron Silver

Nobody has a franchise on what is good is the kind of line that sounds like common sense until you notice the knife-edge inside it. Coming from Ron Silver, an actor who moved comfortably between Broadway polish and combustible political commentary, it plays less like a moral fortune cookie and more like a rebuke to cultural gatekeeping. The word franchise is doing the heavy lifting: it drags morality out of the church-basement realm of values and into the strip-mall world of ownership, branding, and market control. Goodness, he implies, has been treated like intellectual property, something a party, a class, an institution, or a self-appointed cultural priesthood can license to its allies and deny to its enemies.

The intent is both democratic and defensive. Silver isn’t arguing that good is meaningless; he’s arguing that moral authority is routinely used as a power move. If no one has exclusive rights to good, then no side gets to launder its interests as virtue while dismissing dissent as corruption. That subtext matters in an era (and a career) where politics and culture increasingly function as tribe badges: who gets to be “the decent people,” who gets cast as irredeemable.

As an actor, Silver also understood performance - how righteousness can become costume and stagecraft. The line calls out moral branding: the ease with which “good” becomes a logo rather than a practice. Its sting is that it implicates everyone. If goodness isn’t proprietary, it’s also not inherited. You have to prove it, in public, without assuming the audience already belongs to your side.