Life & Wisdom Quote by Gregory Corso

Trust, in Gregory Corso's hands, isn't a Hallmark virtue; it's a beat-era dare. "I just trust people" lands with the offhand swagger of someone refusing the era's default posture of suspicion. The word "just" is doing double duty: it shrugs, as if trust is the simplest thing in the world, while quietly admitting how radical that simplicity is. Corso's speaker isn't offering an argument for faith in humanity so much as staging a stance - a chosen vulnerability - against a culture that rewarded cynicism and control.

Then comes the twist: "and they sense everything's gonna be alright". Trust is framed less as a belief about others and more as a social technology. If you approach people without armor, they respond to the cue; reassurance becomes contagious. The subtext is transactional but not cold: the poem suggests a loop where openness produces calm, and calm confirms openness. It's utopian, but with beat pragmatism: not "people are good", rather "people become better when you let them."

Context matters. Corso wrote out of a postwar America thick with conformity, paranoia, and the emerging machinery of managed life. Against that, his line reads like a pocket-sized manifesto for improvisation and community - an insistence that safety can be made, briefly, between strangers. The genius is how it sounds casual while smuggling in a whole ethic: the risk of believing in people as an act that changes the room.