Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas Fuller

Cruelty, Fuller warns, is not power with a hard edge; it is power poisoned by panic. Calling cruelty a "tyrant" flips the usual hierarchy: the cruel person imagines himself sovereign, but the real ruler is the cruelty itself, a regime that demands constant enforcement. Once you govern by harm, you inherit the logistics of oppression: surveillance, suspicion, preemptive strikes. Fear becomes the standing army that keeps your authority from collapsing.

The line’s bite is in "always attended". Fear isn’t a side effect that occasionally shows up; it is the permanent entourage, the price of admission. Cruelty creates enemies, and then convinces the cruel that enemies are everywhere. That paranoia is its own punishment, a moral boomerang that lands as psychological captivity. Fuller, a seventeenth-century English clergyman writing amid civil war, regicide, and the violent churn of competing authorities, is speaking from a culture that had watched rulers justify harshness as stability. He answers with a colder diagnosis: cruelty cannot secure order because it destabilizes the person wielding it.

As a preacher, Fuller also smuggles in a theological claim without preaching it outright. Tyranny belongs to God’s enemies, not God’s servants; cruelty marks a soul out of alignment, not merely a policy error. The subtext is accountability: if you need cruelty to govern, you are already ruled - by fear, by conscience, by the knowledge that your legitimacy is fragile.