Politics & Power Quote by Isaac Watts

Discipline is the hidden subject here, and Watts frames it in the language of rule and obedience. “Acquire a government over your ideas” isn’t just a pious self-help slogan; it’s a miniature constitutional theory of the mind. Thoughts are treated like a potentially unruly populace: useful when summoned, dangerous when left to riot. The imperative tone signals urgency, the sense that mental life isn’t neutral but consequential, something that can betray you in public, in prayer, in work.

The phrasing “come down when they are called” and “depart when they are bidden” carries the subtext of hierarchy. Ideas aren’t romantic sparks; they’re servants. That’s revealing in a period shaped by Protestant moral seriousness and by anxieties about order, both civic and spiritual. The early modern world prized self-command as evidence of virtue: to be governed was to be safe; to be ungoverned was to be susceptible to temptation, enthusiasm, and faction. Watts (better known as a theologian and hymn writer than as any “politician”) is translating that ethic into a practical technique: attention as governance.

What makes it work is the metaphor’s quiet threat. If you don’t govern your ideas, something else will: impulse, vanity, resentment, fear. The line anticipates a modern attention economy without naming it; it assumes distraction is not merely inconvenient but morally and socially destabilizing. In that sense, it’s less about creativity than about sovereignty: the claim that freedom begins with the ability to command your own inner republic.