Daily Inspiration Quote by Douglas Horton

Pick the wrong target and cruelty becomes a recruitment campaign. Horton’s line is less a moral bromide than a social law: unfair attack creates sympathy faster than any résumé, and it reorganizes a crowd’s loyalties in real time. The phrasing is pointedly transactional. “Abuse” isn’t mere criticism; it’s humiliation, a public handling meant to diminish status. “Unjustly” is the trigger word, because the quote isn’t defending every maligned person - it’s diagnosing what happens when people can see the mismatch between offense and punishment. That mismatch produces moral nausea, and moral nausea looks for an outlet. It often lands as solidarity with the victim.

As a clergyman writing in the early-to-mid 20th century, Horton would have watched reputations rise and fall in the pulpit, in politics, and in the press - all arenas where sanctimony can dress up as righteousness. The quote reads like pastoral counsel to would-be “correctors”: if your rebuke is performative or disproportionate, you don’t just sin; you miscalculate. You hand your opponent an asset: community.

The subtext is quietly cynical about human nature in groups. People don’t always rally around virtue; they rally around perceived fairness. Even those indifferent to the accused can become indignant at the accuser, because unjust abuse signals something uglier than the target’s alleged flaw: it signals the abuser’s appetite for domination. Horton’s warning is also a strategy note for reformers: persuasion dies when contempt enters the room, and the mob you build may end up protecting the very person you wanted to shame.