Daily Inspiration Quote by Mercy Otis Warren

Warren slips a knife into the Enlightenment’s favorite bedtime story: that “natural man” is basically decent until society corrupts him. By calling it “a mistake,” she takes aim at the fashionable innocence peddled by philosophers and revolutionaries alike, then turns the moral telescope back on the people who benefit from believing it. The line is coolly structured to sound like modest correction, but its real force is accusatory. If humans default to cruelty rather than courtesy, then political arrangements aren’t just ornamental; they’re containment systems.

The phrase “disposed to” matters. Warren isn’t claiming people are monsters by necessity, only that the bias of the human animal tilts toward harm unless checked by habit, law, and conscience. Courtesy, in this frame, is not a natural perfume; it’s discipline, taught and enforced. Cruelty, meanwhile, is the easier reflex: the shortcut of power, fear, appetite, and resentment.

Context sharpens the edge. Warren was a Revolutionary-era playwright and propagandist watching lofty rhetoric collide with messy realities: war’s brutality, factional infighting, and the paradox of liberty built alongside slavery and women’s exclusion. Her skepticism reads less like cynicism for its own sake than a warning about naive political theory. If you design a republic assuming virtue will spontaneously bloom, you will be governed by whoever is most comfortable with coercion. Warren’s intent is corrective and preventative: distrust sentimental anthropology, build institutions that anticipate human sharpness, and prize “courtesy” as a civic achievement, not a birthright.