Daily Inspiration Quote by David Brinkley

Washington, D.C. isn’t just a place Brinkley is describing; it’s a self-regarding ecosystem he’s puncturing. The line lands because it’s not a sweeping condemnation of power so much as a pinprick aimed at vanity. “Believe they are important” does the real work: it sidesteps the harder, arguable question of whether these people actually are important and targets the performative conviction that they are. Brinkley, a journalist who spent decades watching Washington narrate itself, frames the capital as a theater where status is both currency and costume.

The intent is slyly diagnostic. In one clause, he captures a city where proximity to authority often substitutes for authority, and where the rituals of significance - titles, access, insider language, the choreography of meetings - can inflate ordinary actors into indispensable ones. The subtext is that Washington’s pathology isn’t simply corruption or ideology; it’s self-importance, the kind that thrives in closed loops of mutual recognition. If everyone around you is always talking about “stakeholders” and “the room where it happens,” it becomes easy to confuse motion with meaning.

Context matters: Brinkley came from an era when broadcast journalism still claimed an outsider’s stance toward government, even while living next door to it. His jab preserves that posture. It’s wry, not revolutionary: a reminder that the capital’s loudest export is often not policy, but the insistence that policy-makers are the main characters.