Daily Inspiration Quote by Alfred Whitney Griswold

Griswold’s line has the clipped confidence of an administrator who’s spent too long watching moral outrage substitute for actual work. “Things have got to be wrong” isn’t a lament; it’s a diagnosis of a social habit. Deploring requires a target. If the world is messy but basically functioning, the professional deplorers are unemployed.

The intent is quietly polemical: he’s puncturing the self-flattering idea that indignation automatically equals virtue. “Deplored” is doing the heavy lifting here. It’s a word associated with public grief, editorial handwringing, campus petitions, pulpit thunder. Griswold suggests that for certain temperaments and institutions, wrongdoing isn’t merely discovered; it’s needed. People don’t just respond to crises - they curate them, enlarge them, keep them in circulation, because condemnation offers a clean identity. You don’t have to build anything to be against something.

As an educator (and a university president in mid-century America), Griswold would have been surrounded by the prestige economy of judgment: committees, gatekeeping, reputation management, and the constant temptation to treat complexity as scandal. The context matters: the 1940s-60s were years when universities were being asked to take moral and political stances under the pressures of war, McCarthyism, and civil rights. His skepticism doesn’t read as neutrality so much as a warning about performative righteousness: the easier it becomes to deplore, the less incentive there is to repair. The aphorism lands because it’s cynical without being nihilistic - it indicts not evil, but our appetite for it.