Motivation Quote by Mike Schmidt

There is something deliberately unglamorous about calling burial a sacred right: it drags “civilization” down from lofty ideals to the one basic human act everyone eventually owes someone else. Coming from an athlete like Mike Schmidt, the line lands less like philosophy and more like a blunt clubhouse truth. No ornate moralizing, just a hard baseline: whatever else we fight about, a society that can’t guarantee people the dignity of mourning and burial is unraveling.

The intent is to set a floor for decency, not a ceiling for virtue. “Virtually every” does a lot of work: it invites consensus while leaving room to condemn the exceptions without naming them. The sentence also smuggles in a quiet accusation. If the right has to be defended out loud, it’s because someone is denying it - through war, political violence, state repression, disaster mismanagement, even bureaucratic neglect. “Peaceably” is the tell. It’s not just about burial; it’s about the right to grieve without harassment, retaliation, or spectacle.

The subtext is cultural, not theological. By framing burial as “sacred,” Schmidt borrows religious weight to argue for a secular minimum: respect for the dead as proof of respect for the living. It’s a move that plays well in public discourse because it short-circuits partisan abstraction. You don’t have to agree on policy to feel the moral embarrassment of a community that can’t safely bury its dead. That’s why the quote works: it anchors big arguments about conflict and order in one undeniable, human-scale obligation.