Daily Inspiration Quote by James Mackintosh

Mackintosh lands a tidy blow against the era's favorite pastime: mistaking ideas for character. Coming from a judge steeped in Enlightenment argument and post-Revolution nervousness, the line reads like courtroom wisdom distilled into social critique. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, "opinions" were not casual takes; they were political flags. To hold the wrong one could get you branded a traitor, an infidel, a Jacobin, a reactionary. Mackintosh, who famously moved from youthful enthusiasm for the French Revolution to a chastened liberalism, knew how quickly the public turns intellectual allegiance into moral sentencing.

The intent is corrective: your stance on a question is an unreliable proxy for your decency. People with excellent principles can behave cruelly; people with dubious theories can still act kindly, loyally, even bravely. As a judge, he would have seen this mismatch daily, where motive, circumstance, temperament, and chance scramble any neat alignment between belief and behavior. The subtext is also a warning to the self-righteous: the pleasure of holding the "right" opinion can masquerade as virtue, while the "wrong" opinion becomes an easy excuse to dehumanize.

What makes the sentence work is its calibrated symmetry - "never so good or so bad" - refusing both saint-making and demon-making. It's not relativism; it's humility with teeth. Mackintosh is asking for a more accurate moral accounting: judge people by what they do, not by the ideological costumes they wear to the party.