Wit & Attitude Quote by William Cowper

Luck is the one democratic institution Cowper trusts: it hands out occasional correctness even to the least qualified. "A fool must now and then be right, by chance" works because it refuses to flatter either side of an argument. The fool doesn’t become wise, doesn’t learn a method, doesn’t earn redemption. He simply collides with the truth the way a broken clock hits noon. Cowper’s emphasis on "must" is the knife twist: probability makes the fool’s brief victory inevitable, which makes it even less meaningful.

The subtext is a warning about how easily we confuse outcome with intelligence. If a wrongheaded person stumbles into a correct prediction or a usable opinion, the surrounding crowd is tempted to retrofit a narrative of insight. Cowper anticipates the social mess that follows: the fool’s accidental hit becomes a credential, a permission slip to speak louder next time. Chance doesn’t just produce random correctness; it produces reputations.

As an 18th-century poet writing in an age that prized reason, moral improvement, and polite judgment, Cowper is also pushing back against the era’s faith in rational self-fashioning. Even in a culture obsessed with discernment, noise can mimic signal. The line has the dry sting of a moral proverb, but it’s also quietly compassionate: it admits that everyone, including the wise, lives with the indignity of randomness. The difference is that the wise know not to worship it.