Daily Inspiration Quote by Kin Hubbard

Kin Hubbard lands the punch with a line that sounds like a wry aside but plays like a full indictment: innocence and the legislature are treated as near-incompatible categories, with the occasional overlap framed as an accident of the system. The joke works because it borrows the cadence of a folksy observation ("now and then") to smuggle in a brutal premise: the default state of politics is compromised, and purity is the anomaly.

Hubbard was a Midwestern newspaper humorist, writing in an era when "reform" was a recurring promise and machine politics was a stubborn reality. The early 20th century loved the language of civic uplift, but it also had a robust appetite for lampooning graft, backroom dealing, and the theatrical pieties of elected officials. Hubbard’s line sits right in that tension. It’s not a revolutionary manifesto; it’s the weary wisdom of someone who’s watched the same play too many times.

The subtext isn’t that legislators are literally criminals. It’s that the institution rewards a certain kind of moral flexibility: networking that shades into favoritism, compromise that hardens into self-preservation, ambition that quietly outranks the public good. Calling the rare honest entrant "sent" to the legislature also hints at coercion or punishment, as if integrity gets drafted into a hostile environment.

And the cruelest twist is how lightly he says it. By presenting corruption as routine weather, Hubbard suggests the most dangerous civic emotion isn’t outrage, it’s shrugging acceptance.