Parenting & Family Quote by Francis Bacon

Bacon’s line is an elegant act of political self-defense disguised as epistemology. In an age when “truth” was routinely stamped by Church decree, royal prerogative, or inherited Aristotle, he flips the prestige economy: authority doesn’t generate truth; it merely licenses it. Time does the harder work - grinding down confident claims through repetition, experiment, dispute, and revision until what survives looks less like obedience and more like durability.

The wit is in the familial metaphor. Calling truth the “daughter” of time gives it a lineage that feels natural, even inevitable, while quietly stripping power from fathers who expect to be obeyed. Authority becomes a bad parent: loud, possessive, and impatient for results. Time, by contrast, is slow, indifferent, and therefore trustworthy. Bacon is selling a new kind of legitimacy for knowledge - one rooted in process rather than proclamation - and he’s doing it in a sentence that sounds like common sense.

Context matters: Bacon is a court insider pushing an insurgent method. He wasn’t a romantic outsider sticking it to the man; he was the man, trying to renovate how the man justifies what he “knows.” The subtext is a pitch for experimental inquiry and institutional patience: let claims earn their status through exposure to the world, not through the social rank of the person making them. It’s a warning, too, about intellectual fashion: authority can win the room today; time is what decides whether it deserved to.