Time & Perspective Quote by G. H. Hardy

Hardy’s jab lands because it borrows the cool authority of a definition and turns it into social critique. “By definition” is doing double duty: it signals the mathematician’s habit of treating arguments like proofs, and it quietly mocks the way majorities justify themselves. If the majority is simply “what most people already do,” then joining it isn’t a choice so much as a default setting. Hardy frames conformity as redundant labor: the crowd has staffing covered.

The subtext is less “be a contrarian” than “allocate scarce intelligence where it actually changes the outcome.” In math, new results don’t emerge from consensus; they come from pushing into regions where no one has map or method. Hardy, famously allergic to practical utility and proud of “pure” work, is defending a particular ethic: serious minds should resist being drafted into the comfortable work of affirmation, whether that’s fashionable opinions, institutional pieties, or the prestige machinery of belonging.

There’s also a classically Hardy sting in “worth.” It reduces social life to an optimization problem: time, talent, and attention are limited, so spend them where marginal impact is highest. The majority doesn’t need your help; the unknown does.

Context matters: Hardy was writing from early 20th-century Britain, watching mass politics, mass culture, and (later) mass mobilization reshape public life. The line reads like an intellectual’s refusal to be absorbed by the era’s loud certainties. Not a manifesto for arrogance, but a warning: if you’re always “with” the crowd, you’re probably not doing work only you can do.