Daily Inspiration Quote by Andrew Young

With one grim little gadget, Andrew Young pins the collapse of discretion on the rise of perfect copies. “Once the Xerox copier was invented, diplomacy died” isn’t really about office equipment; it’s about a shift in power. Diplomacy depends on deniability, on the half-promises and provisional language that let rivals test possibilities without being trapped by them. A copier turns the tentative into the permanent. It makes every draft portable, every aside reproducible, every “off the record” memo a potential weapon.

Young came up in an era when the civil rights movement and Cold War politics were negotiated through back channels, church basements, and private meetings where trust was a tool, not a slogan. As a clergyman-turned-diplomat (and later U.N. ambassador), he understood how moral persuasion and political bargaining both require room to breathe: the ability to revise, to soften, to retract. Xerox culture tightens that room. When documents can be duplicated instantly, the audience for any sensitive conversation expands from a handful of principals to an entire bureaucracy - and, with one leak, to the public. Suddenly everyone speaks for the transcript rather than the outcome.

The line also carries a sly indictment of modern governance: transparency isn’t neutral. It changes behavior. Officials become risk-averse, rhetoric hardens, and negotiation turns into performance. Young’s exaggeration (“died”) is the point; it’s a provocation that frames technology as an accelerant of mistrust, replacing handshake politics with paper trails and turning diplomacy from a craft of ambiguity into a battlefield of receipts.