Wit & Attitude Quote by William Lamb Melbourne

Melbourne’s line has the dry snap of a governing-class confession: the first real qualification for public life (or any life) is accepting you’re not naturally qualified at all. As a Whig politician steering Britain through reform-era turbulence, he’d seen how quickly certainty curdles into blunder. The sentence isn’t a plea for self-loathing; it’s an argument for usable humility, the kind that makes a person trainable by experience.

The intent is corrective. “Neither man nor woman” reads like a small but pointed universalism in an age when political adulthood was gendered and status-soaked. Melbourne widens the target to everyone, then narrows the test to one moment of self-recognition: discovering you are a fool. Not being a fool, but discovering it. The subtext is that foolishness is the default setting; wisdom begins as a diagnosis, not a halo.

The rhetorical move is blunt and strategic. “Worth anything” sounds like an evaluation a society makes, not a private feeling. Melbourne smuggles in a moral standard that doubles as a political one: people who never meet their own incompetence become dangerous, because they confuse authority with accuracy. The line also flatters the reader in a backhanded way: if you can admit your foolishness, you’ve already separated yourself from the incurable kind.

In a period obsessed with decorum and rank, calling everyone a fool is almost democratic. It levels the room, then raises the bar.