Life & Wisdom Quote by E. B. White

Democracy, in E. B. White's hands, isn’t a hymn to the wisdom of crowds; it’s a dry-eyed admission of how little certainty politics can honestly claim. The line turns the usual civic romance inside out. Instead of presenting democracy as a system that discovers truth, White frames it as a habit of mind: suspicion, recurrent and unresolved, that the majority is probably right often enough to justify giving it the steering wheel.

That word "suspicion" does the real work. It’s a comedian’s scalpel and a moralist’s escape hatch. White concedes what democrats rarely say out loud: majority rule is not the same as correctness. It’s a gamble dressed up as legitimacy. The repetition - "more than half... more than half" - is deliberately small-ball, almost comically modest. Not "the people are wise", just "more than half" and only "more than half of the time". Democracy becomes a statistical hunch rather than a sacred principle, which is precisely why it sounds true.

The subtext is a rebuke to authoritarian certainty and to democratic self-flattery at the same time. Dictatorships claim they know. Democracies admit they don’t, then build procedures to manage that ignorance: elections, turnover, dissent, the right to be wrong publicly and revise course later.

White wrote from within a mid-century American moment that prized plain speech and distrusted grand theory. The line matches that sensibility: anti-heroic, pragmatic, quietly protective of a system whose best argument is its willingness to doubt itself.