Wit & Attitude Quote by Thornton Wilder

Wilder slips a blade into what sounds, at first, like a friendly piece of life advice. The line turns on a nasty little paradox: you dont get to choose between wisdom and stupidity; you choose your preferred arrangement of foolishness. Its comic, but not comforting. By repeating "fool" and making it unavoidable, Wilder punctures the fantasy that maturity is a clean graduation into clarity. The real decision is social, not moral: will you accept the humiliations of belonging, or protect your pride by opting for solitude?

The subtext is a critique of the romantic loner pose. To live "among the human beings" is to submit to the daily indignities of other peoples needs, blind spots, and compromises - and to admit you have your own. To live "alone" is to keep your self-image intact, but at the cost of becoming a private myth, answerable to no one, corregible by no one. Wilder makes solitude sound less like purity than like a kind of self-administered propaganda.

Context matters: Wilder, writing in an era scarred by war and ideological certainty, is suspicious of any stance that pretends to be above the crowd. His theater and fiction often treat community as both salvation and burden: we are sustained by others precisely because we are limited creatures. The wit of the line is that it offers no heroic exit. You can be a fool in public, and grow; or a fool in isolation, and calcify.