"Old friends are best"
About this Quote
“Old friends are best” lands with the blunt confidence of someone who’s watched alliances form, fray, and get opportunistically renegotiated. John Selden wasn’t a greeting-card moralist; he was a lawyerly statesman working in a 17th-century England where loyalty could be career-making one week and treason-adjacent the next. In that context, “old” isn’t nostalgia. It’s a credential.
The line’s intent is quietly pragmatic: trust is earned over time, and time is the only audit that matters. In a political world obsessed with fresh coalitions and convenient patrons, Selden tips the scale toward relationships that have survived embarrassment, disagreement, and shifting incentives. “Best” here is less sentimental than actuarial. Old friends are the ones whose flaws you’ve already priced in, whose motives are legible, whose silence or support has a track record.
The subtext also carries a warning about novelty. New friends can be sincere, but they’re untested; they haven’t yet been exposed to the pressure points that reveal character - money, status, risk, public scandal. Selden’s era was thick with those tests: the run-up to civil conflict, religious factionalism, court intrigue. When the ground moves under a society, friendship stops being a vibe and becomes infrastructure.
Rhetorically, the quote works because it’s small and definitive. No qualifiers, no exceptions, no softening. It’s the kind of maxim that feels like it was distilled from too many meetings where everyone smiled, and only the “old friends” stayed loyal after the outcome turned ugly.
The line’s intent is quietly pragmatic: trust is earned over time, and time is the only audit that matters. In a political world obsessed with fresh coalitions and convenient patrons, Selden tips the scale toward relationships that have survived embarrassment, disagreement, and shifting incentives. “Best” here is less sentimental than actuarial. Old friends are the ones whose flaws you’ve already priced in, whose motives are legible, whose silence or support has a track record.
The subtext also carries a warning about novelty. New friends can be sincere, but they’re untested; they haven’t yet been exposed to the pressure points that reveal character - money, status, risk, public scandal. Selden’s era was thick with those tests: the run-up to civil conflict, religious factionalism, court intrigue. When the ground moves under a society, friendship stops being a vibe and becomes infrastructure.
Rhetorically, the quote works because it’s small and definitive. No qualifiers, no exceptions, no softening. It’s the kind of maxim that feels like it was distilled from too many meetings where everyone smiled, and only the “old friends” stayed loyal after the outcome turned ugly.
Quote Details
| Topic | Friendship |
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