Daily Inspiration Quote by Finley Peter Dunne

A cynic’s lullaby disguised as reassurance: history isn’t a staircase up or down, it’s a carousel that makes every generation feel like it’s discovering crisis for the first time. Finley Peter Dunne, the Chicago journalist behind the Mr. Dooley columns, built a career on puncturing civic self-importance, and this line carries that same comic deflation. The dash does the work. It rejects the two favorite narratives of public life - declinism and progress - and replaces them with something more insulting: routine.

The intent isn’t to deny suffering or change; it’s to mock our addiction to moral scorekeeping. “Worse” and “better” are how reformers and reactionaries sell urgency, how newspapers sell editions, how politicians justify power. Dunne’s move is to treat that binary as theater, a performance we stage every election cycle and every moral panic. “Just turning around as usual” implies motion without destination: scandals recur, institutions wobble, reforms arrive with unintended consequences, and the same arguments come back in fresh costumes.

Context matters. Dunne wrote in the thick of industrial America - labor battles, mass immigration, machine politics, imperial adventures - an era loudly convinced it was either modernizing into perfection or sliding into ruin. His joke is that both sides share the same vanity: the belief that this moment is uniquely decisive. The subtext lands as a warning to the righteous and the nostalgic alike: if you want history to be “better,” you don’t get to narrate it into improvement. You have to do the unglamorous work that interrupts the spin of the carousel.