Daily Inspiration Quote by Evan G. Galbraith

"There's something about the Foreign Service that takes the guts out of people" lands like an insider’s groan, not a populist rant: a diplomat admitting that the institution designed to project national confidence can quietly manufacture personal caution. Galbraith isn’t attacking diplomacy as an idea. He’s skewering the bureaucratic ecology around it: the career incentives that reward survival over candor, polish over principle, and the safest possible sentence over the truest one.

The line works because it’s vague on purpose. "Something about" gestures toward a whole system you’re expected to recognize if you’ve lived it: endless clearance chains, cable-writing that sands down meaning, performance evaluations that punish risk, and a culture where being "reliable" often means being unthreatening. "Takes the guts out" is bodily and violent; it suggests not mere fatigue but a procedural extraction of nerve. Courage here isn’t lost in a blaze of failure. It’s eroded by a thousand tiny compromises made in the name of professionalism.

Coming from a diplomat, the critique carries a particular sting. Diplomacy sells itself as hard-headed realism, yet Galbraith hints at a softer, more troubling reality: the institution can train smart people to anticipate disapproval so well they start censoring themselves before anyone else has to. The subtext is a warning about how governments actually drift toward bad decisions - not always through malice or stupidity, but through a cultivated fear of sticking your neck out when the incentives say: keep your head down, keep your post, keep your future.