Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas Fuller

A neatly barbed bit of civic horticulture: Fuller turns the state into a hedge, and men into the materials that either hold it up or hold it together. “Bachelors” are “stakes” - hard, upright, unencumbered, useful for quick support. They can be moved, driven into the ground, deployed where needed. In 17th-century England, that portability mattered: wars, court service, church appointments, colonial ventures. A single man could be risked.

But Fuller’s praise is pointedly second-order. “Married men” aren’t the flashy structural pieces; they’re “binders,” the tough, fibrous ties that stop a hedge from loosening and collapsing. The metaphor quietly shifts the ideal citizen from the heroic individual to the socially entangled one. Marriage, in Fuller’s clerical worldview, is not merely private affection; it’s public adhesive. A married man has dependents, property, routines, reputational exposure. He’s harder to uproot, less likely to gamble the common peace for personal glory, more incentivized to keep the local order intact.

The subtext is moral and managerial. Fuller isn’t attacking bachelors so much as assigning them a constrained role: useful, but potentially destabilizing if they’re all you have. “Strongest stakes” admits their vigor, even their virtue, yet implies brittleness: stakes can snap; they don’t weave. The “hedge of the commonwealth” also carries a defensive logic - society as something that must be maintained against disorder. In the aftermath of England’s political and religious convulsions, Fuller’s line reads like a sermon disguised as practical wisdom: stability isn’t built by strength alone, but by the bonds that make people stay.