Daily Inspiration Quote by Francis Bacon

Progress isn’t a gentle tide in Bacon’s worldview; it’s a bill that comes due. “They that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils” reads like a clinician’s warning delivered to a complacent patient: the body politic, like the human body, changes, mutates, and punishes negligence. Bacon isn’t praising novelty for its own sake. He’s weaponizing pragmatism. If conditions shift and you keep prescribing yesterday’s cure, you don’t get “stability” - you get fresh forms of breakdown.

The line works because it flips conservatism’s favorite promise. Refusing change is typically sold as risk management. Bacon insists the opposite: tradition can be the risk. The subtext is almost managerial in its coldness: you don’t get to opt out of adaptation; you only get to choose whether you adapt proactively or be forced to react once the damage has metastasized. “New evils” is the key phrase - it frames crises as partly self-inflicted, produced by institutional inertia.

Context matters. Bacon writes at the dawn of modern science and empire, when inherited authorities (Aristotelian physics, scholastic reasoning, medieval governance) were colliding with new instruments, new markets, and new political realities. His larger project is methodological: build knowledge that works, knowledge that can intervene. So “new remedies” also signals experimental thinking - not reverence, but testing; not doctrine, but tools. It’s an early-modern motto for reformers: progress isn’t idealism, it’s maintenance. Ignore the leak, and the house won’t stay the same; it will rot in new ways.