Art & Creativity Quote by John Witherspoon

Witherspoon is handing you permission to quit, then smuggling in a political ethic under the cover of personal advice. "Never read a book through merely because you have begun it" isn’t anti-intellectual; it’s anti-inertia. The target is that stubborn little voice that confuses sunk cost with duty, mistaking persistence for virtue. In a culture that prized moral steadfastness, he draws a line between principled commitment and mindless follow-through.

The phrasing matters. "Merely" is the blade: he’s not saying abandon hard things; he’s saying refuse bad reasons. The sentence also treats reading as training for judgment. A reader who can stop is a reader who can evaluate, not just consume. That’s a quietly radical posture in an 18th-century world where authority - clerical, monarchical, institutional - often demanded deference. Witherspoon, a Presbyterian minister-turned-American statesman, lived in the thick of arguments about legitimacy: when loyalty is honorable, when it’s servile, when breaking off is moral clarity rather than betrayal.

Subtext: independence is a mental habit before it becomes a civic one. He’s not only tutoring students (he led Princeton) on managing their attention; he’s modeling the kind of discrimination a republic needs. Governments, like books, can be badly written. The citizenry shouldn’t keep turning pages just because they’re already in chapter five.

It also rebukes performative self-discipline. Finishing can be a flex, a way to display seriousness. Witherspoon’s line deflates that vanity and replaces it with a tougher standard: the courage to change course when the evidence changes.