Daily Inspiration Quote by Benjamin Jowett

Austere to the point of menace, Jowett's line reads like a creed for people who believe talk is moral leakage. The triple imperatives move from posture ("Never retreat") to narrative control ("Never explain") to outcome ("Get it done"), then slam the door with a contemptuous coda: "let them howl". It isn't just advice about efficiency; it's a theory of authority. Retreat concedes weakness, explanation concedes legitimacy to the crowd's judgment, and "get it done" sanctifies action as its own vindication.

Coming from a Victorian theologian and Oxford don, the subtext is almost certainly institutional. Jowett lived in a culture where reputation and orthodoxy could be policed by gossip, pamphlet wars, and moral panic; he himself faced suspicion for liberal theology and his work on Plato. "Let them howl" casts critics as a pack: noisy, instinctual, unreasoning. That metaphor doesn’t merely insult opponents; it pre-emptively devalues their claims. If they're animals, their objections are sound, not argument.

The intent, then, is strategic hardness. In a university and church system obsessed with decorum, refusing to explain is a way to deny opponents a handle. Explanation invites cross-examination; it turns leadership into debate. Jowett's sentence is calibrated to produce a certain kind of actor: someone who treats controversy as weather, not evidence. It's bracing, even liberating, but it also reveals its ethical gamble: the same posture that protects reformers from bad-faith attacks can just as easily shield the powerful from accountability.