Daily Inspiration Quote by Harry Emerson Fosdick

Fosdick is quietly impatient with feel-good morality. The Golden Rule, in his framing, isn’t a bumper-sticker ethic you can “keep” through goodwill; it’s a disciplined act of imagination. He takes a rule that sounds automatic - treat others as you’d want to be treated - and exposes the missing machinery underneath it: you have to figure out what “others” actually experience. The sentence turns on that doubled phrase, “in their places,” first as a moral posture (put yourself there) and then as a mental operation (picture yourself there). He’s arguing that ethics is cognitive work before it’s behavior.

The subtext is a warning against projection. If you skip the “picturing,” you don’t really enter someone else’s circumstances; you just export your own preferences and call it empathy. Fosdick’s insistence on imagining is also an argument for specificity: real people have different constraints, histories, vulnerabilities, and social penalties. “Treat others as you’d want…” can easily become “treat others as I assume they should want,” which is how paternalism dresses itself up as virtue.

Context matters: Fosdick preached through industrial upheaval, mass immigration, the Great Depression, and two world wars - eras when public life kept presenting Americans with strangers and enemies. Liberal Protestant preaching of his kind often tried to translate faith into social ethics, and this line reads like pastoral tech support for conscience. It’s less about sentiment than about training the mind to resist cruelty’s easiest shortcut: not bothering to imagine.