Daily Inspiration Quote by William Penn

Penn frames passion not as a spice of life but as a political emergency inside the self. Calling it "the mob of the man" is a calculated insult: passion is not merely strong feeling, it is collective irrationality, the kind that feeds on its own noise. In one stroke he imports the anxieties of a turbulent 17th century England into the private mind. Mobs meant civil disorder, broken windows, overturned authority. To say passion "commits a riot upon his reason" turns the inner life into a street scene: reason is the lawful magistrate, passion the crowd that surges, shouts, and overwhelms.

The intent is disciplinary. Penn, a Quaker leader steeped in a moral culture of restraint and inward governance, warns that emotion becomes most dangerous when it masquerades as moral certainty. "Riot" is a crucial word: it suggests not only chaos but illegitimacy. A riot is action without sanctioned authority. Penn isn't denying passion's power; he's denying its right to rule.

The subtext is also civic. Leaders who fear crowds often fear the same thing in themselves: impulsive judgment, vanity, vengeance. By making passion a mob, Penn implies that self-mastery is a form of public order, and that the individual who cannot police his own inner street is unfit to guide anyone else's. It's an argument for inner government as the precondition of legitimate outer governance, delivered with the hard-edged realism of someone who watched politics and religion turn emotions into violence.