Daily Inspiration Quote by William J. Brennan, Jr.

For a Supreme Court justice, “Sex” is a startling opening word: blunt, unsheltered, almost tabloid in its immediacy. Brennan knows that jolt is the point. He’s not flirting with sensationalism; he’s staking out a premise that law too often pretends it can avoid. By calling sex “a great and mysterious motive force,” he folds two claims into one: sex is both ordinary enough to organize daily behavior and elusive enough to resist tidy moral or legal categories. “Mysterious” is a lawyerly concession to complexity, a warning against overconfident regulation that treats desire as a mechanical problem.

The line’s subtext is institutional. Courts frequently posture as guardians of decorum, but cases about contraception, obscenity, privacy, and autonomy repeatedly drag them into the bedroom. Brennan frames that recurring confrontation as historically inevitable rather than culturally deviant. “Indisputably” does heavy lifting: he’s preempting prudish counterarguments and signaling that whatever the Court decides, it should not be grounded in denial. The phrase “through the ages” subtly depersonalizes the topic, lifting it out of the era’s moral panic and placing it in the long arc of human preoccupation.

Contextually, this is Brennan’s signature move: translating contentious cultural conflict into a constitutional register without scrubbing the human stakes. He’s reminding readers that sex isn’t merely a “vice” the state manages; it’s a durable engine of identity, intimacy, power, and vulnerability. The rhetorical strategy is simple but shrewd: normalize the subject, dignify the complexity, and make the judiciary’s engagement with it sound not intrusive, but unavoidable.