Daily Inspiration Quote by John Selden

Selden makes monarchy sound less like divine theater and more like household logistics: appoint someone, stop arguing, get dinner on the table. The bluntness is the point. By calling a king "a thing men have made", he strips sovereignty of mystique and returns it to human manufacture: an institution assembled for convenience, not anointed by heaven. That demystification is quietly radical in a 17th-century England still choking on the language of sacred kingship.

The analogy to a family member "appointed to buy the meat" smuggles in Selden's real argument about power: authority often begins as delegation. People outsource messy tasks - procurement, enforcement, decision-making - to a designated figure so daily life can proceed. "For quietness sake" is both justification and indictment. It's peace as a public good, but also peace purchased by submission. Selden implies that a king's legitimacy is conditional and practical: if he doesn't deliver quietness, he's just a failed errand-runner with an army.

Context sharpens the edge. Selden lived through the grinding constitutional crisis that would explode into civil war (and later, regicide). As a lawyerly statesman and parliamentarian, he was invested in the idea that the crown is bounded by law and custom. The subtext is a warning to monarchs who claim absolute authority: you are not God's deputy; you're our appointee. And it's a warning to subjects, too: the longing for "quietness" is how societies talk themselves into handing over more power than they meant to.