Daily Inspiration Quote by Edmund Burke

“Custom reconciles us to everything” is Burke at his most unnervingly clear-eyed: human beings don’t merely adapt to reality, we learn to justify it. The line has the chill of a political warning disguised as anthropology. Burke, the great statesman of caution, is pointing to a force more powerful than argument - habituation. Once a practice hardens into routine, it stops looking like a choice and starts feeling like nature.

The intent is double-edged. On one hand, it’s a defense of inherited institutions: custom is social glue, the accumulated wisdom of people who had to make life work before we arrived with our theories. That Burkean suspicion of abstract reform isn’t just cranky traditionalism; it’s a diagnosis of how quickly zeal can outpace consequences. If custom reconciles us to everything, then tearing up customs in the name of reason risks unleashing chaos before new habits can stabilize.

The subtext, though, is darker: custom also normalizes cruelty. If repeated long enough, injustice becomes background noise, and the public conscience stops registering it as an emergency. Burke lived in an era when Britain could debate “liberty” while profiting from empire and slavery; he also prosecuted Warren Hastings over abuses in India. He understood that moral outrage is perishable, and that time is the great editor, cutting the scandal out of the story until it reads like tradition.

Rhetorically, the sentence works because of its totalizing provocation: “everything.” No loopholes, no comforting exceptions. Burke forces the reader to confront a disturbing possibility: the same mechanism that makes society livable can also make it livable with the intolerable.