Wit & Attitude Quote by Emma Goldman

Goldman flips a familiar insult into a badge of honor. “Foolish enough” lands like a backhanded compliment: the phrase concedes what respectable society always says about radicals - that they’re impractical, reckless, unserious - then calmly argues that this so-called foolishness is the engine of history. The key move is her reframing of caution as a social technology. “Caution” isn’t just personal prudence; it’s the governing instinct of institutions that survive by avoiding risk, policing imagination, and labeling dissent as childish.

The line “throw caution to the winds” is romantic on purpose. Goldman is writing in a culture that treated order as virtue and disruption as pathology. As an anarchist and labor agitator who lived under surveillance, arrest, and deportation, she knew that the demand to be “reasonable” was often a demand to be quiet. Her defense of idealists is also a critique of incrementalism: if you only permit changes that feel safe, you guarantee that the people currently harmed by the status quo keep paying the cost.

The second sentence sharpens the provocation. “They have advanced mankind” is not a soft moral appeal; it’s a historical claim that progress is disproportionately made by people willing to look naïve in the moment. Goldman’s subtext is strategic: if idealism is mocked as impractical, she answers with results. The world gets “enriched” not by perfect plans, but by the audacity to insist on what isn’t yet thinkable - and to risk being called a fool for it.