Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas Hobbes

“Facts” get demoted to livestock here: useful, undeniable, and faintly disgusting in their dull physicality. Hobbes’s jab isn’t anti-reality so much as anti-naivete. He’s taking aim at a certain self-satisfied empiricism: the idea that piling up observations automatically yields understanding, morality, or political order. Call facts “brute beasts” and you expose the fantasy that data can civilize itself.

The line also performs a little rhetorical trap. “Commonly called ‘Facts’” suggests the category is already suspicious - a label people use to stop argument, to imply neutrality while smuggling in interpretation. Hobbes, of all people, knew how raw information becomes a weapon. In a century shredded by the English Civil War, “facts” weren’t just measurements; they were testimonies, pamphlets, claims about sovereignty and scripture, each presented as the plain truth. When the stakes are civil collapse, the fetish for the “merely factual” can look like cowardice: refusing to theorize, to name causes, to build a system robust enough to restrain human appetite.

“Generous minds” is the tell. He flatters the reader into joining the club of those who can’t stand intellectual barnyard smells: minds that want principles, not piles; architecture, not rubble. Hobbes’s own project in Leviathan is exactly that kind of grand construction, where facts about fear, desire, and power matter only once disciplined by geometry-like reasoning. The horror isn’t at reality; it’s at undigested reality pretending to be wisdom.