Daily Inspiration Quote by Hosea Ballou

Brevity, for Hosea Ballou, isn’t a style choice; it’s a moral discipline. A Universalist clergyman preaching in early America, Ballou worked in a culture saturated with sermons, pamphlets, and argument as public entertainment. In that world, verbosity wasn’t just boring, it was suspect: longwinded speech could be a way to hide weak reasoning, inflate authority, or smuggle in dogma under a blanket of pious rhetoric. His line treats economy of language as an ethical technology, the way you keep thought honest.

The phrase “parents of correction” is doing sly, practical work. He doesn’t say brevity produces truth. He says it produces correction: revision, accountability, the willingness to be adjusted. Concise statements are easier to test, easier to dispute, and harder to wriggle out of. A sprawling argument offers endless escape hatches; a tight one forces both speaker and listener to confront what’s actually being claimed. In religious debate, that matters. If your theology hinges on compassion and clarity rather than mystery and intimidation, you need language that can’t easily be weaponized.

There’s subtext here about power. Clergy often wielded length and loftiness as proof of depth. Ballou flips that prestige: the shorter the sentence, the less room for performance, the more room for conscience. He’s arguing for a faith and a public discourse where being right is less important than being correctable. That’s a quietly radical standard in any era, and it lands now because it treats attention not as an audience’s obligation, but as a speaker’s responsibility.