Daily Inspiration Quote by John Fisher

It reads like a stat-driven pep talk for a farm-state audience, but coming from a 16th-century clergyman the line turns into something sharper: a moral argument smuggled in as economic common sense. The “15 percent” isn’t just information; it’s authority theater. Numbers confer inevitability. If agriculture props up Ohio jobs, then protecting agriculture becomes a duty, not a preference. The second sentence tightens the screw by switching from “jobs” to “economy,” letting a local constituency stand in for the whole public good. That move is classic persuasion: make one sector’s prosperity synonymous with everyone’s welfare.

The subtext is about stability and social order. In Fisher’s world, the countryside wasn’t a lifestyle brand; it was the base of the food supply, the tax base, and the hierarchy that kept cities and courts functioning. Linking agriculture to “strength” echoes a religious vocabulary of providence and stewardship: the land must be tended, the people fed, the realm kept whole. A clergyman making this pitch also hints at paternalism - the idea that leaders (spiritual and civic) safeguard the commonweal by defending the productive class that seems most “real.”

Context matters, though: “Ohio” and modern labor percentages are anachronistic for Fisher. Read as a contemporary quote attributed to him, it functions like a timeless mask - a way to borrow premodern moral gravity for a modern policy claim. The rhetorical effect is to turn farm support, subsidies, or protection into something that sounds less like politics and more like prudence, even virtue.