Daily Inspiration Quote by Elihu Root

Root is drawing a hard line between ordinary political conflict and the kind of civic corrosion that makes conflict unmanageable. Self-interest, he implies, is at least legible: you can bargain with it, expose it, trade concessions for votes. Even “stubborn” disagreement about rights has a kind of democratic dignity, because it admits that people are arguing from reasons - claims that can be tested, debated, or constrained by law. Prejudice, passion, and suspicion are different: they don’t just motivate positions; they poison the very conditions for persuasion.

The sentence works by quietly reordering what polite society often treats as respectable versus shameful. Root refuses to romanticize passion as authenticity or moral fervor. He groups it with prejudice and suspicion, suggesting that heat without rigor is politically lethal. The real warning is procedural: when a public is trained to suspect motives rather than contest arguments, opponents stop being adversaries and become threats. That’s the point at which compromise looks like betrayal and institutions become targets, not arenas.

Context matters. Root lived through Reconstruction’s fallout, mass immigration, labor violence, and the early national-security state; as a lawyer-statesman type, he trusted rules, courts, and negotiated settlement. His aim isn’t to deny that interests shape politics; it’s to argue that interests are containable, while identity-driven contempt is contagious. The subtext is a defense of liberal governance: you can survive hard fights over rights, but not a culture that treats disagreement as evidence of bad blood.