Daily Inspiration Quote by Elihu Root

“Nobody knows” is the sly opener here: Root wraps a blunt ideology in the cloak of historical modesty. He claims uncertainty, then immediately asserts a story of human destiny in which “fighting men” are the authors of civilization and the “weak and peaceable” are evolutionary dead ends. The sentence moves like a courtroom argument: vague premise, sweeping conclusion, and a moral verdict smuggled in as description.

Root’s specific intent is to naturalize power. By invoking “thousands of years,” he frames aggression not as a choice but as an ancient law, turning violence into a kind of credential. “Made a place for themselves” is doing heavy lifting: it recasts conquest as self-help, as if domination were simply industriousness with sharper tools. Meanwhile, “gone to the wall” lands with punitive finality. It isn’t just that the peaceable lose; they deserve to lose, because history supposedly keeps score by force.

The subtext is a warning aimed at reformers, pacifists, and anyone tempted by moral restraint: idealism is a luxury in a world run by harder men. Coming from a late-19th/early-20th century American lawyer-statesman, the context matters. This is the era when Social Darwinist logic seeped into respectable policy talk, when empire, “preparedness,” and national virility were sold as realism. Root’s line doesn’t argue for violence outright; it argues that refusing violence is naive. That’s why it works: it offers the comfort of inevitability, absolving the powerful of responsibility while scolding the gentle for expecting history to be fair.