Daily Inspiration Quote by Margaret Deland

Deland’s line yanks “conscience” down from its halo and makes it answerable to the everyday. She’s warning that moral certainty, when it floats free of practical judgment, doesn’t stay pure; it becomes volatile. The phrasing does the work. “Hitched up” is barnyard language, a deliberately unromantic metaphor that treats ethics like a wagon team: conscience is the horse with power, common sense the harness that keeps it from bolting. Without that constraint, the “mighty dangerous thing” isn’t wickedness in the cartoon sense, but righteousness with momentum.

The subtext is a critique of the self-appointed virtuous. Deland lived through the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when reform movements, temperance crusades, and social purity campaigns often fused sincere conviction with punitive zeal. Her novels frequently probe the moral dramas of respectable communities, where private belief turns into public pressure. In that world, conscience can be less an inner compass than a social weapon: people “mean well” while ignoring consequences, complexity, or the fact that other lives are not proofs of their virtue.

What makes the sentence land is its refusal to flatter. It doesn’t dismiss conscience; it demotes it from supreme authority to one component of wisdom. Deland implies that goodness isn’t measured by intensity of feeling but by proportionality, foresight, and humility. A conscience that can’t negotiate reality doesn’t ennoble a person; it recruits them into the oldest American tradition of doing harm while insisting it’s for the good.