War & Peace Quote by Joseph Addison

Addison treats suspicion as a solvent: it doesn’t just sour your mood, it dissolves your moral wiring. The line works because it refuses the comforting split between private feelings and public virtue. Suspicion is framed as an “enemy” to both, implying a single ecosystem where character and contentment rise and fall together. You don’t get to be ethically pristine while living in a constant state of doubt; the posture itself is already a kind of degradation.

The subtext is bracingly psychological. “He that is already corrupt is naturally suspicious” reads like a diagnosis of projection: people who cheat, lie, or manipulate assume everyone else is playing the same game. Suspicion becomes self-justification. If you believe others are crooked, your own crookedness feels less like vice and more like realism. Then Addison flips the knife: “he that becomes suspicious will quickly be corrupt.” Suspicion isn’t merely a symptom; it’s contagious. Once you interpret the world as hostile or deceitful, you start adopting preemptive tactics - small dishonesty, strategic cruelty, moral shortcuts - and soon the guardrail you thought you were protecting turns into the thing you’ve climbed over.

Context matters: Addison is a central voice of early 18th-century bourgeois civility, writing in a culture trying to build public trust in commerce, politics, and the new social world of coffeehouses and print. Suspicion, to him, is anti-social acid. It breaks the delicate bargain that lets strangers cooperate and reputations mean anything. The sentence is a warning disguised as common sense: mistrust doesn’t keep you safe; it teaches you to become what you fear.