Daily Inspiration Quote by Daniel Ellsberg

Ellsberg isn’t offering a fan’s endorsement so much as a provocateur’s dare: judge the leaker by outcomes, not by the moral panic attached to the act of leaking. The line is engineered to invert the usual hierarchy. In Washington, the state claims a kind of priestly authority over secrecy; Ellsberg hands that authority to the accused outsider, casually, with “pretty good so far” doing the heavy lifting. It’s an almost offhand phrase that smuggles in a radical proposition: that the public interest can be curated more responsibly by a dissident publisher than by the institutions built to “protect” it.

The context matters. Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers whistleblower, is speaking as someone who knows how governments expand the category of “secret” until it swallows embarrassment, misconduct, and policy failure. His credibility comes from having watched secrecy used less as shield than as solvent, dissolving accountability. So the compliment to Assange functions as an indictment of official classification culture: if Assange’s batting average is “pretty good,” what does that say about the system that reflexively brands disclosure as harm?

There’s also a defensive subtext aimed at the standard accusation against WikiLeaks: reckless endangerment. Ellsberg counters with a metric of prudence and editorial judgment, implying deliberation, redaction, and restraint - the traits mainstream outlets cite when they separate “journalism” from “espionage.” Calling Assange’s judgment “pretty good” is Ellsberg’s way of insisting that the real scandal isn’t that secrets got out; it’s how many of them never deserved to be secret in the first place.