Daily Inspiration Quote by Douglas Horton

"Love is a given, hatred is acquired" flips a familiar religious instinct on its head: love isn’t a heroic achievement, it’s the default setting. Coming from Douglas Horton, a 20th-century clergyman shaped by world wars, mass propaganda, and the modern machinery of scapegoating, the line lands less like greeting-card comfort and more like a diagnosis of social engineering.

The phrasing matters. "Given" suggests something prior to choice: an endowment, almost a birthright. Horton is smuggling in a theological anthropology without sermonizing it - the idea that the human person begins with an orientation toward connection, and that cruelty requires instruction. "Acquired" is the cold word of markets and habits. Hatred isn’t merely felt; it’s learned, practiced, passed around. It has teachers: families, institutions, political movements, newspapers, pulpit rhetoric. The subtext is accusatory. If hatred is acquired, someone is doing the acquiring on purpose, and someone is profiting from the transaction.

It’s also a strategic reframing for a pastor. By calling love a given, Horton removes the alibi of emotional scarcity ("I just don’t have it in me") and replaces it with moral accountability: what have you allowed to overwrite what was already there? In an era when churches were forced to reckon with complicity and silence, the quote functions as both consolation and indictment. You’re not fated to hate; you were trained to. That means you can be retrained.