Daily Inspiration Quote by Tacitus

Custom isn’t the soothing blanket people pretend it is; it’s the flexible alibi societies keep on hand. Tacitus compresses an entire theory of political hypocrisy into five words: what we call tradition is often just yesterday’s workaround, retrofitted into moral law. The line has the cool, prosecutorial clarity of a historian who watched Romans mythologize their own improvised compromises and then punish dissenters as heretics against “ancient practice.”

The intent is less anthropological than accusatory. Tacitus is pointing at the moment when power needs something - a tax, a purge, an emergency decree, a new heir - and suddenly the culture discovers that it has always believed in precisely that thing. “Custom” becomes a public language for private advantage, an elegant way to make contingency look inevitable. Expediency, meanwhile, is the tell: not reasoned principle, not justice, but what works for the people in charge right now.

The subtext is bleakly modern. Institutions don’t merely bend rules; they manufacture legitimacy after the fact. The Romans were masters at this, wrapping naked necessity in ceremony, precedent, and piety. Tacitus, writing under emperors who maintained republican costumes while hollowing out republican substance, understands that the most effective domination is the kind that feels traditional.

Why it works rhetorically: the sentence is spare, almost legalistic, so it lands like a finding of fact rather than a rant. It doesn’t argue; it records. And that tone is the knife.