Daily Inspiration Quote by Ezra Stiles

Conquest is doing a lot of hidden work here: it is not just a military event but an origin story for political corruption. Stiles, a clergyman steeped in Protestant moral vocabulary, frames government’s fall as a kind of civic Original Sin. The “first governments” suggest an earlier, purer social arrangement, then the “spirit of conquest” enters like a contaminant. After that, history becomes a bleak rerun: “all the succeeding ones” collapsing into “one continued series of injustice.” The line’s power is its refusal to treat injustice as a glitch. It’s a regime.

The rhetoric is sweeping on purpose. “In general” gives him just enough plausible deniability to sound reasonable, while “almost four thousand years” claims the authority of biblical time and classical antiquity. He’s not counting so much as indicting: empires, monarchies, colonial ventures all get folded into a single moral pattern. For an 18th-century American cleric, that matters. He’s writing in an era when the New World is debating legitimacy, rights, and what a “new” republic might be. By rooting political wrongdoing in conquest, Stiles quietly attacks inherited authority: kingdoms and colonial administrations derive from violence before they ever pretend to consent.

Subtext: beware any state that asks you to honor it without interrogating its origin. If conquest is the seed, then law can become a polished language for theft. Stiles isn’t merely lamenting human nature; he’s warning that institutions can sanctify domination unless a people actively re-found government on moral constraints rather than victory.