Wisdom Quote by Sir William Temple, 1st Baronet

Authority doesn’t win by argument; it wins by repetition. Temple’s line lands with the quiet menace of a social fact: power becomes hardest to question precisely when it stops looking like power. “Custom” is the great softener here, turning rules into routine and hierarchy into background noise. The subtext is almost anthropological: people don’t just obey institutions, they inherit them, the way they inherit language or table manners, and then confuse that inheritance with truth.

The sentence is engineered to feel inevitable. “Strengthened and confirmed” stacks two near-synonyms to mimic the cumulative pressure of habit. The key phrase is “bred up to,” which frames belief as upbringing rather than choice. That’s not neutral wording; it implies a kind of domestication. You’re trained into trust, not persuaded into it. Temple isn’t praising stability so much as diagnosing its mechanism: custom launders authority of its origins, making it seem natural, even self-evident.

Context matters. Temple, a 17th-century English writer and diplomat, is speaking from a world anxious about legitimacy: monarchy, church, and social order were being contested, sometimes violently, in the long shadow of civil conflict and religious strife. In that environment, custom becomes a political technology. It secures allegiance without needing constant coercion, and it makes dissent look not merely wrong but unnatural.

Read today, it’s an early sketch of what we now call “the status quo bias” with higher stakes: the way everyday life can be an accomplice to power, not because people are stupid, but because familiarity is persuasive.