Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas Hobbes

Cold comfort is the point. Hobbes takes the romantic varnish off “nature” and replaces it with a ledger. In the state of nature, he argues, there isn’t a shared moral court to appeal to, no agreed-upon “right” that can restrain you when survival is uncertain and everyone is a potential threat. So the only practical standard left is advantage: what helps you live, dominate, or at least not be dominated. “Profit” here isn’t just money; it’s payoff. Safety, power, food, reputation, leverage. If it benefits you, it counts as right because nothing else has enforcement behind it.

The subtext is a brutal demotion of ethics from eternal truth to social technology. Hobbes isn’t celebrating cynicism so much as diagnosing a world where lofty principles can’t function without institutions to back them up. Morality, in his scheme, is not discovered; it’s constructed and policed. Strip away the sovereign and you don’t get noble savages, you get competing rational calculators. “Measure” is the key verb: right becomes a metric, not a virtue.

Context matters because Hobbes is writing in the shadow of the English Civil War, watching a society tear itself apart while each faction insists God is on its side. His insistence that “profit” rules in nature is also a critique of moral rhetoric used as camouflage for interest. People don’t stop pursuing advantage because they use ethical language; they use ethical language to justify pursuing advantage. The line is less a sneer than a warning label: if you want “right” to mean anything beyond appetite, you need a common power strong enough to make it real.