Daily Inspiration Quote by William E. Simon

Simon’s line flatters the donor, then quietly demotes them. “Necessary and important” grants charitable checks their civic legitimacy, the baseline duty of a functioning elite. Then comes the pivot: “But it can’t compare.” The sentence is engineered as a moral re-ranking, moving philanthropy from heroic act to entry fee, and reserving true virtue for “corporal works of mercy” - the old Catholic vocabulary of feeding, sheltering, visiting, tending. He’s not condemning money; he’s condemning distance.

The subtext is a critique of modern compassion as a financial transaction: you outsource suffering to institutions, keep your hands clean, and call it conscience. By invoking “corporal,” Simon insists on bodies - the messy proximity to poverty, illness, incarceration, loneliness. It’s an implicit rebuke to the bureaucratic and managerial style of American benevolence that grew alongside postwar wealth and the professionalization of the nonprofit world. A check is scalable, tax-advantaged, and socially legible; mercy is time-consuming, reputation-risking, and hard to quantify.

Context matters because Simon wasn’t a bohemian moralist; he was a high-ranking public servant and financier in the Reagan era, a period that celebrated private charity while shrinking public guarantees. In that climate, the quote works as both spiritual counsel and political alibi: yes, give privately - but don’t pretend the transfer of funds has completed the moral task. “Infinitely greater” is deliberately extravagant, a theological trump card aimed at a culture that keeps score in dollars. It’s an argument that the deepest social repair starts where status ends: face to face, not line item to line item.