Daily Inspiration Quote by Anthony Burgess

A sneer tucked into five words: belief systems strut onto the stage like theyre eternal, then exit as quickly as fashion. Burgess, a novelist who watched the 20th century cycle through competing orthodoxies - fascism, communism, managerial liberalism, the brittle pieties of postwar Britain - knows how quickly todays sacred truths become tomorrows punchlines. "Every dogma has its day" works because it treats ideology not as revelation but as a trend line, a product with a launch window.

The phrasing is sly. "Dogma" is already a loaded term: it implies not just conviction but the refusal to reconsider. Pairing it with "has its day" shrinks the grandiosity. It sounds like "every dog has its day", the folk saying about eventual vindication, but Burgess swaps in "dogma" to suggest that even rigid certainties get their moment of reward: power, cultural dominance, the glow of moral inevitability. Then time does what time does. The crowd moves on, history re-edits the script, and the once-unquestionable starts looking quaint or dangerous.

Subtextually, Burgess is warning against surrendering your mind to the mood of the era. If dogma is seasonal, being loyal to it is less heroic than it feels. Theres also a writers jab here: novelists traffic in ambiguity, interiority, human mess. Dogma hates mess. So the line doubles as a defense of art - and of skepticism - against the simplified stories societies tell themselves when they want obedience.

Context matters: Burgess lived through propaganda, censorship pressures, and the culture wars of morality and permissiveness. The quote reads like hard-earned immunity to certainty.