Success Quote by Gertrude Stein

Stein is diagnosing a modern sickness before it had a push notification. The line sounds blunt, almost domestic, but it’s a scalpel: information isn’t framed as enlightenment, it’s framed as noise so constant it erodes judgment. The provocation is in the causal chain. It’s not that people lack data; it’s that the steady drip of it unthreads the mind’s ability to sort, weigh, and decide. “Common sense” here isn’t folksy wisdom so much as the capacity to make meaning under pressure.

The subtext is pure Stein: distrust of conventional logic paired with a fierce interest in how attention actually works. As a modernist surrounded by experimental art, psychoanalysis, and new mass media, she watched language and perception get remade in real time. This sentence carries that era’s anxiety: when the world speeds up, cognition doesn’t automatically keep pace. You can drown in facts and still be starved of understanding.

It also has a sly social edge. “Everybody” makes it democratic, but the critique lands hardest on the newly information-saturated classes who confuse exposure with expertise. Stein doesn’t romanticize ignorance; she warns about a different kind of foolishness, the kind produced by constant input and no digestion. The line endures because it anticipates our current predicament: endless feeds, hot takes, dashboards, and alerts that feel like knowledge while quietly outsourcing our thinking. In Stein’s formulation, the tragedy isn’t misinformation. It’s the gradual loss of the mental quiet required to recognize what matters.