Life & Wisdom Quote by Richard H. Davis

Nothing deflates a moral crusade like reminding everyone it probably has dust on it. Richard H. Davis delivers that deflation with a neat bit of late-19th-century skepticism: if an idea is genuinely "good and true", it’s almost certainly not a fresh discovery but a recycled certainty we keep pretending to invent.

The line works because it flatters and needles at once. On the surface, it praises moral clarity. Underneath, it mocks the culture’s addiction to novelty - the way reformers, lecturers, and magazine writers sell old wisdom as if it were a new product launch. "At this late date" carries the real bite: history has had ample time to test human behavior, and our recurring failures don’t mean the rules are newly revealed, only newly ignored. It’s a jab at moral fashion cycles, where yesterday’s obviousness returns wearing new vocabulary.

Davis wrote in an era crowded with uplift rhetoric, social reform movements, and a booming print culture that commodified lessons into digestible morals. In that marketplace, calling something "new" was marketing, not epistemology. His sentence exposes the mechanism: the moral’s truth is measured less by originality than by durability. If it endures, it’s because it keeps needing to be relearned.

The subtext is a warning to the moral entrepreneur: don’t confuse repackaging with revelation. And to the audience: if you’re hearing it as news, that says more about collective amnesia than about progress.