Daily Inspiration Quote by Emily Greene Balch

A line like this only lands if you remember how much early-20th-century public life demanded a badge: flag or creed, preferably both. Balch is pointing at a group of people treated as socially unanchored - immigrants, internationalists, dissenters, pacifists, the religiously unaffiliated - and refusing the premise that belonging must be certified by the state or sanctified by the church. The sentence is built as a quiet rebuttal. It starts with what her era would call a deficit ("Without a common loyalty...") and then pivots to a provocation: they "nevertheless" share "a vast deal in common". The subtext is almost accusatory: if you can't see their commonality, you're looking with institutional blinders.

Balch, a reform-minded educator and peace advocate, wrote and worked in a period when nationalism and organized religion were major engines of legitimacy. Her phrasing exposes how loyalty gets policed: not as an inner ethic, but as membership in recognized structures. By contrasting "either a state or a church", she pairs the two dominant authorities that manufacture social cohesion and turns them into parallel, interchangeable demands.

What's slyly radical is the wager underneath: solidarity can be built from lived conditions, moral commitments, and shared vulnerability rather than top-down identity. It's an argument for pluralism that doesn't romanticize difference; it insists on the practical sameness that institutions conveniently ignore. In an age anxious about "rootless" people, Balch reframes rootlessness as a new kind of root: common human stakes, not common slogans.