Daily Inspiration Quote by George Bancroft

Bancroft is drawing a harsh but practical hierarchy of bad faith. Ignorance, he argues, is curable because it is passive: people inherit notions they have never inspected, and when reality presses hard enough, those notions can be replaced. The more dangerous prejudice is the one with a paycheck attached. When a belief protects status, property, or power, it stops being a mistake and becomes a strategy.

The line works because it refuses the comforting liberal fantasy that all disagreement is just a matter of education. Bancroft splits error into two psychological modes: the "blindly adopted" bias of socialization and the "willfully preferred" bias of self-preservation. That second phrase is the dagger. It implies the person knows, at some level, that the prejudice is untenable, but keeps it anyway because the alternative costs too much. The subtext is a warning to reformers: don't confuse an argument you can win with evidence for an opponent you can actually persuade.

Context matters. Bancroft wrote as a 19th-century historian-politician in a United States convulsed by sectional conflict, patronage, and the economics of slavery and expansion. His generation watched moral language get conscripted into material contests. In that world, "interest" isn't just greed; it's the lattice of institutions that rewards certain stories about who deserves what. Bancroft is telling you where the real resistance lives: not in the head, but in the incentives.