Daily Inspiration Quote by William Allen White

A small-town editor’s ethics, sharpened into a sentence that sounds almost homespun until you notice how hard it cuts. William Allen White isn’t offering warm blanket advice about “getting along.” He’s laying down a reciprocity contract for civic life: if you expect the world to absorb your rough edges, you don’t get to behave like a perfectionist inquisitor when someone else shows theirs.

The intent is practical and slightly prosecutorial. “Since others have to tolerate my weaknesses” forces a confession of fallibility before you’re allowed to judge anyone else. White, who made a career of addressing communities in the language of common sense, turns humility into a social rule, not a private virtue. “Only fair” is the tell: this isn’t sentimental forgiveness; it’s fairness, a word that belongs to newspapers, juries, and town arguments. He’s translating moral behavior into a kind of public accounting.

The subtext is a critique of moral arrogance, especially the kind that thrives in tight-knit places where everyone knows your business and still pretends they don’t. Editors live at the intersection of grievance and reputation; they see how quickly private flaws become public weapons. White’s line anticipates that dynamic and tries to defuse it with symmetry: the community survives not by denying weakness, but by pricing it in.

Context matters: coming of age in the Progressive Era, White championed reform without romanticizing human nature. This sentence is reform-minded realism: better norms, lower self-righteousness, fewer purges.