Wit & Attitude Quote by E. M. Forster

Forster’s line lands with the dry click of a well-made trap: it’s a complaint that doubles as a confession. “It is my fate” casts the speaker as the victim of circumstance, the decent person cursed to navigate an indecent world. Then Forster undercuts that self-exoneration with “and perhaps my temperament,” a sly pivot from martyrdom to self-indictment. The wit is in the self-awareness: if you keep “signing agreements with fools,” at some point you’re not merely unlucky - you’re complicit, or at least temperamentally inclined toward compromise, politeness, and the kind of social optimism that assumes people will behave reasonably once the paperwork is done.

The phrase “sign agreements” does heavy lifting. This isn’t just having fools in one’s orbit; it’s formalizing the relationship, giving it legitimacy, binding oneself through etiquette, contract, or institutional procedure. Forster, a novelist of manners and moral weather, knew how often English respectability mistakes process for wisdom. Bureaucracy and civility can make foolishness look official.

Calling them “fools” is blunt, almost impatient, and that impatience is part of the subtext: the speaker has spent too long translating nonsense into something workable. It’s the lament of the conscientious collaborator who keeps getting recruited by incompetence - and keeps saying yes, because refusal feels like a breach of character.

Contextually, it fits Forster’s larger preoccupation with the friction between private integrity and public arrangements: the way systems (clubs, committees, empires, families) pressure the sensitive person into agreements that feel reasonable in the moment and ridiculous in retrospect. The sting is that the temperament that makes someone humane can also make them easy to enlist.