Daily Inspiration Quote by Samuel Richardson

Bad reputations don’t just stick; they set like wet cement. Richardson’s line is a coolly observed bit of social physics: people are far more invested in their suspicions than in their compliments, because suspicion feels like wisdom. In an 18th-century world where your name was your currency and the room was your courtroom, a prejudice “in disfavor” wasn’t merely an opinion. It was an unofficial verdict, repeated through gossip, insinuation, and moralized storytelling until it hardened into something like fact.

Richardson, a novelist obsessed with how virtue gets tested and misread, is pointing at the asymmetry built into judgment. Favorable bias can be updated away with a single disappointment; negative bias recruits evidence. Once someone is tagged as untrustworthy, every neutral act becomes “proof,” every mistake becomes “character.” The mind stops investigating and starts prosecuting. That’s the subtext: prejudice isn’t just error, it’s narrative. And narratives don’t like being revised.

The phrasing matters. “Fix deeper” suggests something mechanical and bodily, like a stain that penetrates fabric. “Removed” carries the sense of surgery or cleaning, not debate. Richardson isn’t arguing for a nicer attitude; he’s warning about how costly it is to regain innocence after it’s socially revoked.

Read now, it also anticipates our reputational economy: the ratio of scandal to correction, allegation to retraction. Praise is frictionless; distrust feels protective. Richardson’s insight is bleakly modern because it describes a bias that masquerades as prudence while quietly doing damage.