Daily Inspiration Quote by Stephen Leacock

Trust, in Leacock's hands, isn’t a moral achievement; it’s a negotiated settlement between liars. The line lands because it flips a cherished civic ideal into something like an insurance policy: you don’t rely on a person because they’re virtuous, you rely on them because their vices are predictable. That’s the joke, and it’s also the diagnosis.

Leacock was an economist by training and a satirist by instinct, and you can feel both muscles working. The phrase "exact degree" borrows the cold precision of measurement, as if dishonesty were a tariff schedule or an interest rate. He smuggles in a bleak little model of social order: cooperation doesn’t require honesty so much as stable expectations. Markets function not when everyone is good, but when everyone is legible.

The subtext is an indictment of the self-congratulatory stories modern societies tell about themselves. We celebrate "trust" as if it’s proof of character; Leacock suggests it’s proof of calibration. His "entitled to expect" sharpens the cynicism: dishonesty isn’t an aberration, it’s a known quantity you’ve already priced in, perhaps even granted as a right. That tiny legalistic note implies complicity. If you’re entitled to expect deceit, you’re also consenting to a world where deceit is standard operating procedure.

Written in the early 20th century, amid mass politics, advertising, and expanding bureaucracy, the line reads like an early warning about institutional life: systems don’t collapse under hypocrisy; they stabilize around it. The laughter catches because it’s uncomfortably plausible.