Daily Inspiration Quote by Don DeLillo

Power, DeLillo reminds us, doesn’t just govern; it stage-manages. The line lands with the cold confidence of someone who’s watched institutions behave like characters in one of his novels: speaking in public, deciding in private, and treating transparency as a kind of amateur hour. “Arrangements” is the tell. It’s not policy, not debate, not even conspiracy in the tinfoil sense. It’s logistics: deals, favors, timing, the quiet choreography that turns authority into something self-renewing.

The specific intent is less to accuse than to demystify. DeLillo strips power of its civic costume and shows the mechanism underneath: secrecy as a technology. Not because every hidden meeting is evil, but because secrecy creates asymmetry. If you don’t know what’s being decided, you can’t contest it; if you can’t contest it, you can’t redistribute it. The subtext is almost architectural: power expands in enclosed rooms, then presents itself as inevitability.

Contextually, DeLillo’s work has long orbited the murky interface of state, media, and paranoia in late-20th-century America: the JFK assassination’s aftershocks, Cold War atmospherics, the way mass communication can amplify uncertainty while shrinking accountability. His point isn’t that citizens should become amateur sleuths. It’s sharper: secrecy isn’t an occasional abuse of power; it’s one of power’s native languages. Public life becomes performance, while the real script circulates offstage, protected precisely because it keeps working.