Education Quote by Clifton Fadiman

Trust the guy who won’t sell you trust. Fadiman’s line takes a familiar American virtue kit - steady eye contact, firm handshake, that whole Boy Scout of credibility routine - and flips it into a telltale symptom. The joke lands because it’s not really about manners; it’s about performance. In a culture that treats sincerity as something you can demonstrate physically, the body becomes a prop, and props are for people with scripts.

The intent is lightly cynical but not nihilistic: “experience” here is the credential, not ideology. Fadiman isn’t arguing that everyone is a liar; he’s saying that the easiest way to fool people is to mimic what they’ve been trained to read as honesty. The handshake is especially barbed, a ritual marketed as neutral and wholesome but historically tied to power, deal-making, and masculine norms of legitimacy. If you know the audience expects that gesture, you can weaponize it.

Subtext: we confuse confidence with virtue, fluency with truth. The line is also a quiet jab at American transactional optimism, where trust is fast-tracked through surface signals so commerce can keep moving. “Particularly” sharpens the suspicion: it’s not the eye contact that’s damning, it’s the extra effort - the over-signaling, the insistence on being believed.

Contextually, Fadiman wrote from a 20th-century media world saturated with salesmanship, public relations, and broadcast personas. His warning feels designed for a society learning that the most convincing faces are often the most curated.