Wit & Attitude Quote by George Crabbe

A lie, Crabbe suggests, survives less on its own muscle than on our reflex to wrestle it. The image is wickedly practical: a big fish on dry land looks terrifying because it thrashes, makes noise, and commandeers attention. But it’s already doomed by the environment. The lie’s “frightful bother” is theater - agitation mistaken for power. Crabbe’s intent isn’t to minimize deceit; it’s to expose its dependency. A “great lie” needs oxygen, and the oxygen is our engagement: panic, rebuttal, gossip, outrage, even well-meant amplification.

The subtext is a warning about the addictiveness of response. “You have only to keep still” reads like moral discipline dressed up as survival advice. Stillness here isn’t passivity so much as strategic refusal: don’t provide the friction that turns a falsehood into a public event. Crabbe is quietly indicting the social appetite for spectacle - the crowd that gathers around the flopping fish, turning its last convulsions into entertainment and, unintentionally, prolonging them.

Context matters. Crabbe wrote as an Anglican clergyman-poet with a satiric eye for village reputations, rumor economies, and the cruelty of small social systems. In a world of pamphlets, pulpit rhetoric, and tight-knit communities, lies often traveled through talk more than institutions. His metaphor anticipates a modern media logic: attention is lifeblood. The line lands because it flatters no one; it asks for restraint when restraint feels like losing. It’s an ethics of not feeding the monster.