Time & Perspective Quote by G. M. Trevelyan

“Anger is a momentary madness” is a historian’s verdict delivered like a diagnosis: brief, clinical, and faintly prosecutorial. Trevelyan doesn’t romanticize rage as righteous fire; he demotes it to a temporary loss of reason. The phrase “momentary madness” works because it reframes anger from a feeling you “have” to a condition that “has” you - a seizure of the self. That small rhetorical pivot strips anger of moral glamour. If it’s madness, it’s not insight. It’s impairment.

The second clause tightens the vise. “Control your passion or it will control you” isn’t advice so much as a power analysis. Passion here isn’t merely emotion; it’s a rival sovereignty. You can govern it, or be governed by it. The subtext is almost constitutional: internal self-rule is the prerequisite for any credible authority outward. Coming from Trevelyan - a major British historian shaped by an era that watched empires strain, democracies wobble, and mass politics weaponize feeling - the warning reads as more than self-help. It’s a theory of how civilizations unravel: not only through bad ideas, but through moods that become movements.

There’s also a moral sting in the economy of “momentary.” He grants anger its brevity, then implies its consequences aren’t brief at all. A second of “madness” can write history in ink that doesn’t wash out. Control, in that light, isn’t repression; it’s the thin line between agency and regret, between judgment and the kind of reckless certainty that makes disasters feel inevitable only afterward.