Life & Wisdom Quote by William Dunbar

Law, Dunbar suggests, isn’t a cathedral of pure rules; it’s a crowded marketplace of motives. The line lands with the blunt practicality you’d expect from a poet who watched power up close: in court, in courtly life, in the daily bargaining between status and survival. “Does not know men” isn’t a plea for warm empathy. It’s a hard-edged warning that legal reasoning, by itself, is a partial instrument. The handicapped lawyer is the one who treats clients, judges, juries, and opponents as abstractions - as if human beings will behave like tidy syllogisms.

The intent is professional, almost tactical: your case lives or dies on character, vanity, fear, greed, pride, shame. Dunbar’s subtext has a faintly cynical bite. “Know men” means recognizing the scripts people run when they’re cornered, the stories they tell to look innocent, the bargains they accept to save face. It’s also a gendered phrase of its era, reflecting a legal world dominated by men, where authority was personal and reputation could be as binding as precedent.

Context matters: late medieval Scotland was a society of patronage networks, church power, and volatile politics, where persuasion often mattered more than neutrality. Dunbar, a court poet, understood that language is never just decorative; it’s leverage. The quote works because it collapses the lofty idea of justice into a simple diagnostic: if you don’t understand human behavior, you’ll misread the room, misjudge risk, and mistake technical correctness for winning.