Daily Inspiration Quote by Morley Safer

A culture reveals itself by who it calls “defective” - and by how eagerly it looks away when the so-called defective turn out to be the most humane people in the room. Morley Safer’s question lands like a soft accusation: if those we pathologize or pity are “instinctively caring and compassionate,” then the defect may not be in them at all. It may be in the standards that measure worth by speed, polish, productivity, or “normalcy.”

Safer, a journalist whose career was built on making audiences confront what they’d rather smooth over, frames the line as a diagnostic. He isn’t praising compassion in an abstract, greeting-card way; he’s pointing at the embarrassment lurking under our categories. “Considered defective” is doing heavy work: it flags that the label is social, not scientific, and that it’s often applied to people with disabilities, neurodivergence, or other stigmatized differences. The adjective “instinctively” sharpens the provocation. If care is reflexive for those society imagines as broken, what does that imply about the rest of us - the credentialed, the “functional,” the admired - who so often treat compassion as optional, strategic, or performative?

The subtext is both moral and political. When institutions are built to rank and exclude, tenderness becomes a kind of quiet counter-evidence, an unintended indictment. Safer’s line pushes readers to interrogate the comfort of the hierarchy: maybe we call people defective to justify withholding resources, attention, even basic dignity. The question doesn’t ask for admiration; it demands self-recognition.