Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Burns

A slap at the respectable classes, delivered with Burns's trademark grin sharpened into a blade. "Cant" is the tell: not mere talk, but sanctimonious, performative moralizing. Burns is ridiculing the people who invoke "decorum" the way a landlord invokes the law - as a tool to police others while laundering their own self-interest into virtue. The line doesn't plead for freedom; it sneers at the idea that social rules deserve reverence in the first place.

The subtext is class warfare dressed as comedy. Only those with "characters to lose" can afford to treat reputation like property: something bankable, inheritable, protected by the community's deference. If you're already marked - poor, rustic, politically suspect, sexually improper - decorum is just another fence built after you were born outside it. Burns flips the usual logic: the moralizers aren't guardians of order; they're people with assets at stake, begging the world to keep valuing the currency they've accumulated.

Context matters because Burns lived in a culture that prized "polite" refinement and suspected the "unpolished" voice. As a farmer-poet moving between taverns and salons, he knew how reputation could open doors or slam them. This line is his refusal to audition for approval. It works because it's both defensive and aggressive: a preemptive strike against shame. He doesn't argue his innocence; he questions the authority of the court. The couplet's punchy rhythm makes it feel like a toast raised at the very moment someone tries to hush the room.