Life & Wisdom Quote by Lewis Carroll

Carroll lands this like a magic trick: he shows you the trap while you’re still falling into it. The line reads like a piece of advice, but it’s really a diagnosis of a social weakness - our hunger for certainty dressed up as numbers. “Inspire confidence” is the tell. Confidence isn’t the same as truth; it’s a mood you can manufacture. Statistics become stage props: impressive, repeatable, and conveniently resistant to argument because who wants to look like the person “against data”?

The bite comes from the escalation: accurate, intelligible, who cares? Carroll is mocking not only the speaker who weaponizes figures, but the audience that rewards quantity over clarity. “Enough of them” suggests a saturation tactic - overwhelm the listener until skepticism feels like homework. It’s the same strategy behind bureaucratic reports, political talking points, and today’s dashboard culture: if the chart is dense enough, the conclusion can coast.

Context matters. Carroll wrote in a Victorian world intoxicated by measurement - censuses, actuarial tables, industrial accounting - where “scientific” language carried moral authority. As a mathematician, he knew the difference between precision and performance. That double identity sharpens the irony: the joke isn’t anti-math, it’s anti-prestige. Numbers are powerful tools, Carroll implies, precisely because they can be used by people who don’t understand them on people who won’t challenge them.

The subtext is bleakly modern: credibility can be generated without comprehension. The cure, quietly implied, is not fewer statistics, but harder questions about what they mean and who benefits when they don’t.