Daily Inspiration Quote by Hosea Ballou

Exaggeration usually gets a free pass as the charming cousin of lying, the harmless spice you sprinkle on a story to keep it moving. Ballou won’t let you have that comfort. By calling exaggeration a "blood relation to falsehood", he collapses the moral distance people like to maintain between outright deception and rhetorical inflation. The family metaphor is doing quiet work here: if they share blood, they share responsibility. Exaggeration isn’t an accident of style; it’s a choice with lineage.

The sting lands in "nearly as blamable". Ballou doesn’t pretend every overstatement is identical to a calculated lie, but he also refuses the modern loophole that intent alone absolves you. The subtext is pastoral and practical: communities corrode not only from big betrayals, but from the steady drip of small distortions that train everyone to discount language. When speech becomes performative, truth becomes negotiable.

As a clergyman in the early American republic, Ballou was speaking into a culture of pulpit oratory, revival fervor, and public moral instruction. Religious rhetoric often leaned on heightened language to stir conscience; Ballou’s warning reads like an internal critique of that temptation. He’s policing the boundary between persuasion and manipulation, reminding fellow moralists that the credibility of a preacher, and of a people, can be lost through theatrics as easily as through vice.

It works because it weaponizes a mild word - exaggeration - and makes it feel ethically serious without becoming puritanical. Ballou’s sentence is a scalpel aimed at self-excusing speech.