Time & Perspective Quote by Robert Walpole

Walpole is doing what the best political operators do when the knives are out: he shifts the trial from facts to credibility. The “satisfaction” is pointed - not serenity, but a controlled smirk. He’s suggesting the real battlefield isn’t whatever he’s accused of; it’s whether the accusation hangs together and whether the people pressing it can be trusted. That’s not a defense so much as a reframing: if the public can be made to doubt the coherence of the “charge” or sniff self-interest in the “prosecutors,” the substance barely matters.

The phrase “impression to be made” is the tell. Walpole isn’t speaking like a man expecting pure justice; he’s speaking like a man who understands politics as theater, where perception is the verdict. “Consistency” does double work: it implies the opposition’s case is internally shaky, and it plants a standard by which any minor contradiction becomes disqualifying. Then he sharpens the blade with “motives,” inviting listeners to see prosecution as performance - revenge, factional ambition, moral posturing - anything but principled accountability.

Context matters: Walpole, Britain’s de facto first prime minister, was a master of patronage and parliamentary management, and he drew constant charges of corruption from rivals who wanted power as much as purity. This line assumes an audience fluent in that cynicism. It’s less an appeal to innocence than to political literacy: don’t ask whether I’m spotless; ask whether my enemies are credible, or merely hungry.