Success Quote by Edward Coke

Blunt, almost mechanical, Edward Coke’s line has the chill of a courtroom maxim: pull the plug on the cause and the effect dies on the spot. It’s the kind of sentence that pretends to be simple while doing heavy ideological work. The syntax doesn’t argue; it declares a law of reality, as if social conflict, political authority, and human motives can be reduced to clean chains of causation. That’s the rhetorical trick: inevitability as persuasion.

In context, Coke is less “businessman” than architect of English common-law power, writing in an era when monarchs still tested the limits of legal constraint. His world is one of prerogative versus precedent, of courts trying to claim that the state itself must operate through rules. “The cause ceasing…” functions like a legal off-switch. If the original justification for a rule, punishment, or power disappears, so should the power. It’s a compact weapon against overreach: you can’t keep extraordinary authority alive on yesterday’s emergency.

The subtext is anxiety about permanence. Institutions love to keep effects without the causes: taxes after wars, surveillance after crises, restrictions after “temporary” dangers. Coke’s phrasing treats that drift as illegitimate, not merely inconvenient. He smuggles a moral demand into a logical form: stop acting like inertia is a reason.

It also flatters the listener with a jurist’s clarity. No sentiment, no sermon, just a tidy principle that can be deployed anywhere. That portability is why it sticks: it offers a universal veto on power’s favorite habit, the habit of not leaving when the reason for arriving is gone.