Time & Perspective Quote by Richard Cecil

Punctuality gets framed here not as a personality quirk but as a moral debt. Cecil, a clergyman speaking from an 18th-century world thick with hierarchy and social obligation, makes time a form of property: if you schedule someone, you are holding a slice of their life in trust. The shock of the line is how quickly it moves from etiquette to ethics. He refuses the genteel excuse that lateness is merely “my problem.” No: it becomes an act of quiet theft.

The subtext is a rebuke to the powerful, the charming, and the self-important, the people most likely to treat waiting as a tribute others must pay. Cecil’s “I have no right” sounds legalistic on purpose, like a spiritual audit. He’s smuggling a broader theology of stewardship into a mundane social practice: your hours aren’t yours to squander on someone else’s behalf.

It also anticipates a modern truth about inequality and attention. The person who can habitually run late is usually the person buffered by privilege: servants, status, flexible schedules, an audience trained to accommodate. Cecil flips the script and insists on reciprocity. If you waste your own time, that’s mismanagement; if you waste mine, it’s moral trespass.

In a culture that often treats busyness as prestige, Cecil’s line is bracingly unglamorous. It says respect isn’t performative warmth; it’s logistics. Showing up on time is how you prove you understand another person has a life you don’t get to edit.