Daily Inspiration Quote by John Fiske

Persecution doesn’t begin with hatred; it begins with certainty. Fiske’s line is a scalpel aimed at the most respectable justification for cruelty: the belief that you’re not merely right, but right beyond appeal. By locating the “persecuting spirit” in an “assumption,” he frames repression as a cognitive error before it becomes a political act. The subtext is chillingly practical: violence often arrives wearing the clean clothes of principle.

Fiske wrote in the late 19th century, when Darwinian debates, higher biblical criticism, and expanding public education were scrambling old moral authorities. In that climate, “infallibility” wasn’t just a personal flaw; it was an institutional posture, especially in churches and states that still treated dissent as contamination. His broader project as an American philosopher and popularizer of evolution leaned toward liberal Protestantism and Enlightenment confidence in progress. This sentence is progressivism’s warning label: the minute a worldview declares itself immune to error, it starts hunting heresy.

The intent isn’t to defend relativism or shrug at truth. It’s to separate conviction from absolutism. Fiske implies that disagreement is tolerable as long as it’s paired with epistemic humility - the adult admission that your beliefs are provisional, revisable, and limited by your vantage point. Once that humility is gone, opponents stop being people with arguments and become obstacles to be managed.

What makes the quote work is its psychological accuracy: persecution rarely feels like persecution to the persecutor. It feels like responsibility.