Daily Inspiration Quote by Russell Baker

Baker’s line is a scalpel aimed at a favorite alibi of modern life: the idea that history itself has issued a permission slip. By starting with “Usually,” he dodges the naive posture of absolute pacifism. He’s not claiming every hard choice is immoral; he’s saying the rhetoric of “progress” is routinely abused precisely because it sounds clinical, inevitable, above politics. “Requires them” is the tell. It’s the bureaucrat’s verb, the technocrat’s shrug, the politician’s attempt to convert agency into necessity.

The sentence works because it flips a sacred American narrative. Progress is supposed to be the story we tell to justify disruption, sacrifice, even collateral damage. Baker insists that when harm needs a slogan to make it palatable, it’s often not a tragic side-effect of improvement but the main event: power exercising itself, cruelty laundering its image, institutions protecting their comfort. The blunt repetition of “terrible things” at the end is deliberate anti-euphemism. No “unintended consequences,” no “externalities,” no “enhanced interrogation.” Just terrible.

As a journalist, Baker is writing from within a century that sold “progress” in every register: wars marketed as liberation, urban renewal that erased communities, economic “reforms” that treated human beings as rounding errors. The subtext is a demand for proof. If an action claims the authority of progress, it should be able to answer a basic question without hiding behind destiny: who benefits, who pays, and why is the suffering necessary rather than merely convenient?