Daily Inspiration Quote by Augustus Baldwin Longstreet

A sly little demolition of authority, delivered with the straight face of a courthouse clerk. Longstreet sets up “all the knowing ones” as a chorus of local expertise, then empties their wisdom out on the floor: after all that consultation, their consensus amounts to two options that cover every possible outcome. It is prediction as performance, not knowledge. The line lands because it mimics the rituals of serious deliberation - consulted, agreed, “to a man” - while exposing how often those rituals conceal the simplest truth: people like sounding certain more than they like being accurate.

The comedy is in the pomp. “The issue” is framed like a civic question, but the content is a bare-knuckle inevitability: somebody’s getting flogged. That whiplash tells you what Longstreet is really sketching. This is frontier democracy with its sleeves rolled up, where public opinion is loud, unanimous, and basically useless. The “knowing ones” are less analysts than spectators, and their expertise is the social kind: they know how to take sides, not how to see ahead.

As a lawyer, Longstreet would have recognized how consensus can be manufactured by rhetoric and group pressure, then mistaken for truth. The phrase “to a man” hints at a closed circle - masculine, clubby, confident - the sort of unanimity that flatters itself. Under the joke sits a sharper implication: communities often outsource judgment to the self-appointed wise, who repay that trust with tautologies dressed up as certainty.