Wit & Attitude Quote by Cicero

Cicero’s line is a piece of moral triage: it separates the ordinary human slip from the truly dangerous kind of stubbornness. The first clause is almost generous. Error isn’t framed as a scandal or a sin; it’s a condition of being human, the price of acting in an uncertain world. That setup matters because it disarms defensiveness. If everyone is “liable to err,” then admitting a mistake doesn’t mark you as weak; it marks you as sane.

Then the knife turns. “Only a fool persists” shifts the focus from the mistake itself to the ego that protects it. The subtext is less about intellect than character: the fool is the person who clings to a bad position because backing down would cost status, pride, or face. Cicero is diagnosing a social pathology, not an abstract flaw in reasoning. Persistence, in Roman public life, could be sold as virtue - steadfastness, constancy, loyalty. He flips that cultural script: there’s a kind of “steadfast” that is just vanity wearing a toga.

In context, this is the voice of a statesman-philosopher trying to discipline a political class addicted to self-justification. Late Republican Rome was an arena where reputations were currency and concessions could look like defeat. Cicero’s intent is corrective: he offers a standard for leadership that values revision over performance. The line works because it reframes changing your mind as competence, and doubling down as the real embarrassment. It’s a compact argument for intellectual humility with real civic stakes.