Daily Inspiration Quote by Andrew Young

Legality looks less like a moral boundary here than a pricing model. Andrew Young’s line lands with the blunt clarity of a sermon, but its real bite is political: it treats the law not as a fixed code but as a negotiable outcome, vulnerable to coordination, lobbying, and sheer institutional heft. The exaggeration (“one hundred businessmen”) is deliberate. Young isn’t counting; he’s sketching a threshold where private power becomes public permission.

The subtext is an indictment of respectable impunity. A lone person doing the same act is a criminal; a cohort with capital, attorneys, and access becomes an “industry practice,” a “regulatory gray area,” a “necessary innovation.” Young frames this as a collective decision, not an accidental loophole, pointing at the social machinery that turns wrongdoing into norm: campaign donations, friendly regulators, revolving doors, selective enforcement, and the quiet intimidation of being “too big to challenge.”

Context matters because Young is not an anarchist tossing grenades at the idea of law; he’s a clergyman and civil rights figure who watched legality get weaponized and then rewritten. Segregation was once lawful; protest was once illegal; conscience routinely arrived ahead of statutes. That history gives the quote its moral authority and its cynicism: if law can sanctify injustice, it can also launder greed.

The intent isn’t to romanticize lawbreaking. It’s to pressure the reader to ask who gets to define “legal,” and why economic power so often counts as a kind of unofficial immunity.