Daily Inspiration Quote by William F. Buckley, Jr.

Buckley’s line lands like a confession delivered with an arched eyebrow: a conservative icon admitting, without melodrama, that the mind’s first impulses can be ugly. The phrasing matters. “Some” is doing heavy work, narrowing the blast radius. He isn’t denouncing himself; he’s signaling selective self-knowledge. “Instincts” are framed as pre-rational, bodily, automatic: not quite choices, not quite excuses. Then he drops the moral gavel anyway - “reprehensible” is a courtroom word, cool and severe, the sort of judgment Buckley usually aimed at other people’s arguments.

The subtext is a bid for credibility in a culture that punishes contradiction. Buckley built a career on patrician confidence and ideological certainty, yet here he smuggles in the idea that virtue is not a temperament but a discipline. It’s also a quiet acknowledgment of what political life relies on while pretending it doesn’t: that our “instincts” often run ahead of our principles, and that public reasoning can be a retrofit. For a journalist and polemicist, it’s a way of staking a claim to seriousness. If you can admit your baser impulses, you can present your stated beliefs as earned, not merely inherited.

Contextually, it fits Buckley’s mid-century Catholic-inflected moral vocabulary and his role as the face of an American conservatism trying to look intellectually respectable while navigating its own darker reflexes. The line works because it’s restrained: a self-indictment that doubles as a credential.