Life & Wisdom Quote by Will Cuppy

The joke lands because it punctures two inflated myths at once: the cult of the all-knowing genius and the smug certainty that usually follows it. Cuppy opens with Aristotle as the gold standard of encyclopedic authority, then needles him with a spectacularly wrong belief about the brain. That whiplash is the setup. The punchline - "This is true only of certain persons" - yanks Aristotle's error out of ancient history and drops it into the room with us, turning a quaint scientific mistake into a contemporary personality diagnosis.

Cuppy's intent isn't to litigate Aristotle's biology; it's to show how reverence can fossilize into intellectual laziness. The subtext reads like: people love "great thinkers" until thinking gets in the way of idolizing them. By choosing an error that feels almost comically backward to modern readers, Cuppy highlights how even the brightest minds are captive to their era's assumptions, and how easily authority gets mistaken for omniscience.

Context matters: writing in the early 20th century, Cuppy was a specialist in deflating grand narratives with deadpan mischief. Post-Darwin, post-Freud, and amid accelerating scientific change, the idea that anyone "knows everything" already sounded absurd. His last line weaponizes that modern skepticism against a timeless target: the type who treats the brain as decorative equipment, present mostly to keep the blood from overheating while opinions happen elsewhere.