Wit & Attitude Quote by Norman Douglas

A lie, in Norman Douglas's formulation, isn't just a moral lapse; it's a high-risk craft. The line flatters honesty while quietly demoting it: truth-telling is framed less as virtue than as the default setting for the intellectually underpowered. That inversion is the hook. Douglas turns a familiar ethical lesson into a social diagnosis, implying that deception is inevitable in human affairs and only becomes catastrophic when executed by amateurs.

The subtext carries a wary, almost aristocratic skepticism about public morality. "Handle" is the tell: lying is something you manipulate, like a volatile tool, not a spontaneous sin. To "handle a lie" wisely suggests strategic restraint, attention to audience, and an awareness of unintended consequences. A wise liar knows when not to lie, how much to claim, and when to retreat. The fool, meanwhile, isn't morally superior; he's simply safer when constrained by transparency. Honesty becomes a guardrail.

Douglas wrote in a period where Victorian certainties had curdled into modern disillusion: empire, class performance, sexual respectability, and politics all ran on managed appearances. As a writer associated with the decadent and cosmopolitan fringes, he had reason to distrust pieties that pretended social life could function without masks. The line lands because it acknowledges what polite society denies: integrity is admirable, but competence is what keeps the damage contained.