Life & Wisdom Quote by Thomas More

The line lands like a wink that hardens into a weapon: it borrows the cozy format of “folk wisdom” to smuggle in contempt. By staging itself as practical advice, it pretends to be about prudence and ends up being about policing who counts as a credible mind. The rhetorical move is simple and durable: invite a woman to speak, then convert her speech into a negative sign. Her counsel becomes useful only as an obstacle course for male judgment.

The subtext is less “women are wrong” than “women must be consulted only as a ritual.” The “ask” implies inclusion while the “do the very reverse” restores hierarchy. That tension is the engine of the joke. It flatters the listener as “wise” not for discernment but for reflexive contrarianism, turning sexism into a shortcut to certainty.

Context matters. More writes from a world where women’s formal access to education, civic authority, and authorship was constrained, then uses that constrained condition as evidence of innate unreliability. It’s a neat circularity: deny expertise, cite the absence of expertise. Coming from a humanist era that celebrated reason and counsel, the punchline also reveals how selectively “reason” was distributed. The wise man, in this formulation, isn’t the one who weighs arguments; he’s the one who already knows which voices can be dismissed.

The line’s longevity is the uncomfortable proof of its craft. It packages social control as wit, letting prejudice pass as a clever rule of thumb rather than an argument that can be challenged.