Daily Inspiration Quote by Sallust

A clean mind, Sallust implies, is not a personality trait; it is an ethical requirement for anyone who wants their judgment to count. “Doubtful matters” aren’t trivial ambiguities but the kinds of political and civic questions where evidence is partial, motives are mixed, and a decision still has to be made. In that terrain, feelings don’t merely color perception - they become a substitute for reasoning. Hatred and friendship rig the outcome in advance; anger narrows the field of vision to vengeance; pity, though flattering to our self-image, can turn policy into theater.

The line works because it refuses the comforting fiction that some emotions are “good” biases. Sallust doesn’t just warn against malice; he brackets affection and compassion alongside it, treating them as equally capable of corrupting deliberation. That’s a hard-edged Roman posture: public counsel is not confession, and the state is not a place to work out private loyalties. The phrasing “should be void” is almost clinical, like draining a vessel before measuring its contents.

Context matters. Sallust wrote against the backdrop of the late Roman Republic, when factional loyalty and personal patronage routinely masqueraded as principle. His histories are saturated with the idea that Rome’s crises weren’t simply military or constitutional; they were moral failures dressed up as politics. Underneath this sentence is a prosecutorial claim: the republic collapses when counsel becomes an extension of vendetta, favoritism, or sentimental display. It’s less a call for coldness than for the discipline to keep judgment from being annexed by the heart.