"Love is a given, hatred is acquired"
About this Quote
Love arrives with us; hatred is learned along the way. The claim rests on a simple observation about human beginnings: infants seek connection, imitate smiles, and cry at another baby’s cry. The impulse to attach, soothe, and be soothed appears before ideology, before tribe, before grievance. Hatred, by contrast, requires a story. It feeds on fear, injury, and the narratives we are taught about who threatens us and why. It asks for repetition and rehearsal, for rituals of separation, for an us that must be defended against a them.
Douglas Horton, an American clergyman and ecumenical leader, wrote in a century shaped by world wars, racial segregation, and hardening political lines. His aphorism pushes back against the temptation to see violence and suspicion as the real bedrock of human nature. It echoes a religious conviction he would have known well: people bear an image of goodness that precedes their failures, while sin, estrangement, and cruelty are distortions that take root through habit and harm. Even without theology, social psychology points the same way. Prejudice grows where fear is cultivated, where leaders profit from scapegoats, where wounds go unhealed and are given enemies to blame.
Calling love a given is not sentimental. It does not deny aggression or the tribal reflex. It argues that our first equipment includes empathy and the capacity for care, and that these can be strengthened by practice. If hatred is acquired, it can be unlearned. Contact across differences, truthful memory of harm, shared projects, and the steady work of repair weaken the stories that make enemies. The line therefore assigns responsibility. We are not fated to hostility; we are trained into it. We can also train out. To choose love is not to ignore danger, but to refuse to let fear write the only script. It is to return, again and again, to what was ours from the start.
Douglas Horton, an American clergyman and ecumenical leader, wrote in a century shaped by world wars, racial segregation, and hardening political lines. His aphorism pushes back against the temptation to see violence and suspicion as the real bedrock of human nature. It echoes a religious conviction he would have known well: people bear an image of goodness that precedes their failures, while sin, estrangement, and cruelty are distortions that take root through habit and harm. Even without theology, social psychology points the same way. Prejudice grows where fear is cultivated, where leaders profit from scapegoats, where wounds go unhealed and are given enemies to blame.
Calling love a given is not sentimental. It does not deny aggression or the tribal reflex. It argues that our first equipment includes empathy and the capacity for care, and that these can be strengthened by practice. If hatred is acquired, it can be unlearned. Contact across differences, truthful memory of harm, shared projects, and the steady work of repair weaken the stories that make enemies. The line therefore assigns responsibility. We are not fated to hostility; we are trained into it. We can also train out. To choose love is not to ignore danger, but to refuse to let fear write the only script. It is to return, again and again, to what was ours from the start.
Quote Details
| Topic | Love |
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