Daily Inspiration Quote by Louis Nizer

Self-protection is a better lobbyist than truth. Nizer, a courtroom operator who made his living dragging inconvenient facts into daylight, distills a psychological defense tactic into one clean sentence: we don’t evaluate evidence neutrally; we pre-screen it for emotional damage. The line’s bite is in the phrasing “slow to believe” - not “unable,” not “ignorant,” but strategically delayed. People can accept the truth; they just ask for time, excuses, and often a softer version.

The subtext is legal as much as it is human. In a trial, “hurt feelings” shows up as reputation, shame, and identity: the defendant who can’t admit wrongdoing without collapsing their self-image; the witness who remembers selectively; the jury that prefers a story that keeps the world legible and themselves righteous. Nizer understood that persuasion isn’t only logic vs. logic. It’s narrative vs. discomfort. Facts that threaten the ego don’t just meet skepticism; they meet procedural obstruction.

Contextually, the quote lands in a 20th-century America where public life was increasingly mediated by publicity, celebrity, and image management - arenas where feeling and face-saving become currency. Nizer isn’t offering a gentle self-help observation; he’s diagnosing why obvious problems (from personal betrayals to institutional failures) can sit in plain sight for years. The sentence works because it refuses to flatter the reader. It implies that our highest ideals about being “rational” are often after-the-fact justifications for an older instinct: don’t let reality embarrass you.