Daily Inspiration Quote by Ralph W. Sockman

Courage, Sockman suggests, isn’t mainly a battlefield virtue; it’s a social one. The minority is where reputations are risked in slow motion: the glance that lingers too long, the job that quietly disappears, the friendship that suddenly cools. In that position, bravery looks less like swagger and more like endurance - holding a view, a vote, a neighbor’s humanity when the room wants you to shut up and sit down. He’s reframing “courage” as the willingness to absorb isolation without converting it into self-pity or martyrdom.

Then he flips the moral test onto the comfortable. Tolerance, in this formulation, isn’t a badge you wear when you have little power; it’s what you do with leverage. Majorities can afford to be generous and often choose not to be, because “normal” feels like a natural law rather than a political arrangement. Sockman’s subtext is unsparing: the majority’s self-image is always at risk of becoming a moral alibi. It’s easy to congratulate yourself for being open-minded when no one is asking you to share a school board, a neighborhood, a pulpit, a hiring pipeline.

As a 20th-century American religious leader, Sockman is also speaking into an era of mass conformity and churn - wars, Red Scares, civil rights battles, the rise of broadcast consensus. The line works because it turns ethics into a mirror that changes with your position. Power doesn’t just tempt people to dominate; it tempts them to believe their dominance is neutrality.