Daily Inspiration Quote by Dean Acheson

Washington isn’t a city in Acheson’s line; it’s a machine with damage control built into its skin. The self-sealing fuel tank is a wartime marvel: pierced, leaking for a moment, then swelling shut so the plane can keep flying. Acheson borrows that engineering image to describe the capital’s political metabolism - its ability to absorb scandal, bad ideas, even genuine trauma, and continue functioning with minimal visible scar tissue.

The intent is not admiration so much as wary diagnosis. Acheson, a hard-nosed Cold War operator who lived inside the national-security state he helped build, is pointing to a system optimized for continuity. Bullets become a metaphor for shocks: policy failures, moral compromises, public outrage, the occasional constitutional crisis. Washington registers the hit, then reflexively repairs the breach with process, press cycles, bureaucratic rerouting, and bipartisan amnesia. The leak is the only moment when truth, accountability, or consequence might spill out; the seal is the establishment snapping back into place.

Subtext: resilience can look a lot like impunity. The same feature that prevents catastrophe also prevents learning. If every puncture gets patched instantly, nothing forces the aircraft to land and ask why it’s taking fire in the first place.

Context matters. Acheson’s generation saw government expand into permanent mobilization - World War II into the Cold War - where stability was prized and “keeping the plane in the air” became the governing ethic. His metaphor flatters Washington’s survivability while quietly indicting its talent for making even bullets feel routine.