"Bluster, sputter, question, cavil; but be sure your argument be intricate enough to confound the court"
About this Quote
Wycherley’s line drips with the kind of courtroom-savvy cynicism you’d expect from a Restoration dramatist who made a sport of exposing polite society’s disguises. The instruction isn’t to win by being right; it’s to win by making the room too tired, too muddled, or too status-conscious to locate the truth. “Bluster” and “sputter” are the noises of performance, not reason. “Question” and “cavil” (nitpick, insinuate, grind down) suggest a strategy of attrition: keep the other side permanently responding, never advancing. Then comes the real punchline: don’t aim for clarity; aim for intricacy. Build an argument like a hedge maze and let the court get lost in it.
The subtext is less “law is corrupt” than “law is theater.” In Wycherley’s world, institutions don’t merely tolerate showmanship; they reward it. Complexity becomes a form of authority. If you can make your case sound technically dense, you can borrow the prestige of expertise while smuggling in weak premises. It’s a satirical manual for what we’d now call weaponized procedure: confuse the standard of judgment, then declare victory when judgment fails.
Context matters. Wycherley wrote in an era where wit was both currency and weapon, and where the public sphere was expanding but not necessarily becoming more honest. The line skewers a system in which rhetorical agility outranks moral seriousness. It also anticipates a modern anxiety: that complexity, in the hands of the unscrupulous, can be less a tool for justice than a fog machine for power.
The subtext is less “law is corrupt” than “law is theater.” In Wycherley’s world, institutions don’t merely tolerate showmanship; they reward it. Complexity becomes a form of authority. If you can make your case sound technically dense, you can borrow the prestige of expertise while smuggling in weak premises. It’s a satirical manual for what we’d now call weaponized procedure: confuse the standard of judgment, then declare victory when judgment fails.
Context matters. Wycherley wrote in an era where wit was both currency and weapon, and where the public sphere was expanding but not necessarily becoming more honest. The line skewers a system in which rhetorical agility outranks moral seriousness. It also anticipates a modern anxiety: that complexity, in the hands of the unscrupulous, can be less a tool for justice than a fog machine for power.
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| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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