Daily Inspiration Quote by Alan Paton

Paton’s line is a quiet rebuke disguised as a piece of moral hygiene: stop treating ethics like a cost-benefit spreadsheet. “Expedient” is the tell. It’s the vocabulary of administrators, party men, and anxious pragmatists who can justify nearly anything as necessary, efficient, or “realistic.” Paton aims his sentence at that mode of thinking and insists on a different internal court of appeal: not strategy, but conscience.

The construction matters. “You ask yourself” makes the demand private and intimate; it’s not a slogan for rallies, it’s an instruction for the moment before action, when rationalizations are born. The pairing “this or that” shrinks the options to mere maneuvers, interchangeable tactics. Against that, “right” stands alone - blunt, singular, refusing to be negotiated down. Paton’s intent isn’t naivete about consequences; it’s a warning about how consequence-talk becomes a solvent that dissolves responsibility. Expedience is always ready with a narrative. “Right” is often just a bare fact you’d rather not face.

Context sharpens the edge. As a South African novelist writing in the long shadow of institutionalized racism, Paton understood how systems defend themselves: not with cartoon villainy, but with procedural logic, incrementalism, and claims of stability. The subtext is that injustice rarely arrives announcing itself; it arrives with paperwork and “reasonable” arguments. Paton’s sentence refuses that comfort. It’s a call to choose the morally clarifying question even when it makes you ineffective, unpopular, or unsafe - because that’s precisely when expedience starts sounding like wisdom.