Daily Inspiration Quote by John Selden

Selden’s line reads like a permission slip with a razor edge. “It’s not the drinking to be blamed, but the excess” doesn’t defend booze so much as it defends a certain kind of governing logic: regulate the overflow, not the impulse. As a statesman in a culture where ale was safer than water and conviviality was a social glue, Selden isn’t naïve about drink; he’s allergic to puritanical simplifications. The target is moral panic that treats a commonplace habit as a public crime.

The craftsmanship is in the pivot. By shifting blame from the act to the degree, Selden narrows the prosecution’s jurisdiction. Drinking is framed as normal conduct; “excess” is the true offense, a word that smuggles in moderation as the civil ideal. It’s also a quiet argument about freedom. If the state (or the church) starts condemning the baseline behavior, you get blanket prohibitions and hypocrisy. If you condemn the excess, you preserve social life while still policing harm.

The subtext is classed, too. “Excess” is the kind of term elites love: flexible, selective, enforceable against the unruly without requiring the genteel to surrender their own pleasures. In early modern England’s recurring fights over “disorder,” Selden’s aphorism offers a tidy framework for law and custom: vice isn’t always the thing itself, but the loss of measure. That’s a political philosophy disguised as tavern wisdom.