Daily Inspiration Quote by William Jennings Bryan

Bryan is dressing a barnyard proverb in courthouse robes, and the comedy is the point. "Do not compute the totality of your poultry population..". is an over-tailored way to say "don’t count your chickens before they hatch", but the inflated diction performs a lawyer’s favorite magic trick: turning plain risk into a formal caution that sounds unassailable. It’s mock-bureaucratic, almost self-parodying, as if the speaker can’t resist polishing folk wisdom until it gleams with Latinate certainty.

The specific intent is practical: warn against premature certainty, especially the kind that tempts you into commitments you can’t unwind. But the subtext is political and rhetorical. Bryan, a famous populist with a preacher’s cadence, often played both sides of the register: speaking for ordinary people while demonstrating he could dominate the language of institutions. Here, he signals: I can translate your common sense into the language that elites respect, then hand it back to you with extra authority.

Context matters because Bryan lived in a period obsessed with progress, numbers, and managerial confidence - the early 20th century faith that the future could be audited in advance. His sentence mocks that impulse. By making "counting chickens" sound like an actuarial report, he undercuts the era’s technocratic swagger: life is still subject to hatch rates, accidents, and the stubborn fact that outcomes arrive on their own schedule.

It works because it’s simultaneously a warning and a wink. The joke lands, the lesson sticks, and the speaker looks shrewd for having anticipated the human weakness for getting ahead of reality.