Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Burns

A stark indictment of the harm humans inflict on one another, the line from Robert Burns’s 1784 dirge Man Was Made to Mourn condenses a broad social critique into a lament. Burns gives the words to an old man addressing a youth, and through that voice he surveys a world where poverty, exploitation, and needless suffering seem woven into daily life. The repetition of man on both sides of the offense universalizes the roles of perpetrator and victim, suggesting that cruelty is not an aberration at the margins but a recurring, human-made feature of society. The phrase countless thousands widens the aperture from a single grievance to a mass condition, implying structures and histories that perpetuate mourning on a vast scale.

The poem emerged from late 18th-century Scotland, amid agrarian upheaval, widening class divides, and militarized conflicts that conscripted the poor to serve the ambitions of the powerful. Burns, the ploughman poet, wrote with intimate knowledge of rural hardship and with democratic sympathy for the common laborer. In the dirge he catalogs the indignities of deference to lairds, the grinding of the poor by the rich, and the bleak inheritance of those born without privilege. Yet the line works not only as fatalism but as moral indictment: if human-made inhumanity causes the grief, then human agency can also unmake it.

Its sound helps explain its endurance. The alliteration of m in man’s, makes, and mourn, the compact rhythm, and the mirroring structure give the sentiment the force of a proverb. Over time it has become a touchstone invoked in the face of war, slavery, genocide, and institutional cruelty, resonating whenever grief arises from deliberate human choices rather than natural fate. Burns’s lament endures because it names what is intolerable with plain clarity, and by naming it, presses for conscience, solidarity, and change.