Daily Inspiration Quote by Arthur Joseph Goldberg

Power usually shows up after the fight, when the cameras arrive and the paperwork starts. Arthur Goldberg’s line, “The trick is to be there when it’s settled,” is a cool, almost prosecutorial distillation of how decisions actually get made: not in speeches, not in principled positioning, but in the cramped room where the last objections are traded away and the final language gets typed.

Goldberg, a labor lawyer turned Supreme Court justice turned UN ambassador, lived inside institutions that run on procedure but move through leverage. The quote carries the sensibility of collective bargaining: the strike vote matters, the rally matters, but the deal is born in the settlement meeting. “Trick” is doing work here. It suggests that access is less a medal for righteousness than a skill, even a hustle. Being “there” is not geographic; it’s relational and strategic. Who gets invited, who’s on the call, who has standing when the compromises become irreversible.

The subtext is a warning to idealists and a manual for operators. Politics flatters the public with process, then rewards the people who can endure ambiguity until it collapses into text. “When it’s settled” is also a euphemism for the moment power becomes invisible: once an outcome is framed as inevitable, dissent starts to look like noise. Goldberg’s line doesn’t romanticize that reality, but it refuses to pretend otherwise. If you care about outcomes, you don’t just argue well; you make sure you’re present at the moment arguments stop and decisions harden.