Time & Perspective Quote by Douglas Horton

The line lands like a deadpan sermon punchline: a grand “announcement” that delivers a fact so self-evident it collapses under its own pomp. “Born at a very early age” is technically true and comically useless, a tautology dressed up as revelation. Horton’s intent isn’t to share information; it’s to spoof the performative seriousness of public confession and self-mythologizing. He’s parodying the kind of autobiographical humility that’s really self-advertising: the speaker steps to the podium, clears his throat, and offers… nothing.

The subtext is a critique of people who confuse the act of speaking with the act of saying something. By framing the obvious as overdue news, Horton mocks institutions (including religious ones) that can become addicted to pronouncement. Clergy are trained to make meaning out of the ordinary; here, the move is inverted. Meaning is withheld on purpose, forcing the audience to notice how often language is used to claim authority rather than communicate.

Context matters: Horton was a clergyman in an era when public life prized earnestness, respectability, and the cultivated persona. The joke reads as self-protective intelligence inside a profession stereotyped as solemn. It signals: I know the script, and I know how easily “testimony” becomes theater.

What makes it work is its precision. The sentence mimics formal disclosure (“it is generally known… about time to announce”), then punctures it with a nursery-level truth. The laugh is the sound of inflated rhetoric being let out, one careful hiss at a time.