Faith & Spirit Quote by Robert Southey

Moral shortcuts always invoice the person taking them first. Southey’s line is aimed at the seductive fantasy that “the end justifies the means,” and he dismantles it with a grim bit of psychological realism: even if your scheme “works,” you don’t walk away unchanged. The damage isn’t hypothetical, or contingent on being caught. It’s internal, immediate, “certain.”

The phrasing is doing quiet but heavy lifting. “Never let a man imagine” frames self-deception as the real antagonist; the mind is where corruption begins, long before courts or reputations get involved. “Good end” sounds noble, abstract, and public-facing. “Evil means” is blunt, concrete, and private. Southey is warning that moral language is often just camouflage for appetite, fear, or ambition. And by locating the offense “against his own soul,” he makes the stakes intimate rather than theological: your character is not a tool you can safely blunt for a cause and then sharpen again later.

Context matters here. As a Romantic-era poet who lived through the ideological whiplash of the French Revolution and its aftershocks, Southey saw how righteous slogans can license brutality, and how movements that promise renewal can end up manufacturing hard men. This is less a sermon than a prophylactic against political intoxication: if you train yourself to do harm for “good,” you’re also training yourself to do harm, period. The “effect” is habit-forming; the conscience learns to look away.