Quote of the Day — 2026-09-05

But to my mind, though I am native here and to the manner born, it is a custom more honour'd in the breach than the observance.

About Shakespeare

William Shakespeare (1564-1616) was an English playwright, poet, and actor from Stratford-upon-Avon, almost universally regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's preeminent dramatist. Working chiefly for the Lord Chamberlain's Men (later the King's Men) in London, he wrote roughly 39 plays and 154 sonnets across tragedy, comedy, and history, including 'Hamlet', 'Macbeth', 'Othello', 'King Lear', and 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'. His plays fused poetic language with deep psychological insight into ambition, love, jealousy, and mortality, and he is credited with introducing or popularizing thousands of English words and phrases still in everyday use. His work remains the most performed, translated, and quoted body of literature in history, studied in schools worldwide and continually reinterpreted on stage and screen.

Historical context

Shakespeare lived in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, a period of rapid social change, political tension, and intense debate over authority, religious conformity, and public duty. Elizabethan and Jacobean society placed immense weight on traditional customs, court etiquette, and inherited rituals to maintain social order. However, writers of the era frequently questioned whether blind obedience to established traditions was virtuous, particularly when those customs encouraged drunkenness, violence, or moral decline. The line speaks directly to this tension between inherited obligation and ethical judgment. Over the centuries, the phrase detached from its dramatic setting to become a widely repeated English maxim, frequently invoked in legal, political, and cultural discussions to argue that bad habits or unreasonable rules are better broken than maintained.