Daily Inspiration Quote by Lionel Blue

Self-exoneration is the cheapest moral luxury, and Lionel Blue refuses to buy it. The quote is built as a private cross-examination: not "What would they have done?" but "What would I have done?" That shift matters. Blue, a clergyman, takes aim at the comforting myth that decency is our default setting and courage simply appears when history demands it. His first question is hypothetical, but the answers are brutally plausible. "Probably" punctures the heroic daydream; it sounds like someone who has watched ordinary fear outperform lofty principle.

The line turns on two chilling gradations of failure. "Looked the other way" is the familiar sin of omission, the respectable cowardice that keeps hands clean while letting violence proceed. Then Blue tightens the screw: "apologist for evil" is complicity with a vocabulary. It points to the way institutions - churches included - can launder wrongdoing through explanation, context, and "prudence" until it resembles necessity. He’s not only indicting personal weakness; he’s diagnosing how moral language itself becomes a shield for immoral outcomes.

In context, Blue is writing in the long shadow of the Holocaust and other 20th-century atrocities, when the postwar question "What would you have done?" often functions as a moral selfie. Blue turns that mirror into a warning: the test isn’t exceptional villainy but ordinary self-preservation, plus the social rewards of fitting in. The quote works because it denies the reader the simplest comfort - that we’d be the righteous exception - and asks what habits we’re practicing now, before any test arrives.