Politics & Power Quote by Thomas Fuller

There’s a sermon’s worth of mischief packed into Fuller’s line, and it lands because it weaponizes a definition. Instead of arguing policy, he reduces “a conservative” to a posture: the reflexive suspicion that novelty itself is guilt. The joke is partly grammatical. “Believes nothing should be done” is already absolutist; “for the first time” tightens the vise, turning prudence into paralysis. It’s a tidy piece of rhetorical judo: he uses the conservative’s own self-image (careful, responsible, tradition-minded) and flips it into cowardice dressed as principle.

Fuller, a 17th-century English clergyman writing in the shadow of civil war and regime change, isn’t merely sniping at a party label that didn’t exist in modern form. He’s diagnosing a social temperament that becomes especially visible when history speeds up. In a period when authority was being contested and institutions were violently remade, “first times” weren’t abstract. They were new oaths, new church governance, new legal precedents, new lines of loyalty. Fuller’s subtext: when upheaval makes people crave stability, “tradition” can become a convenient alibi for doing nothing at all.

The sting is that it doesn’t deny the value of caution; it exposes how caution can curdle into a moral pose. Conservatism here isn’t stewardship of what works. It’s an aesthetic of the already-done, a belief that safety equals virtue. That’s why the line still circulates: it’s less a critique of policies than of the comforting story we tell ourselves when we’re afraid to risk being wrong in public.