Wit & Attitude Quote by David Hare

Certainty is Hare's favorite villain, and this line skewers it with the cool efficiency of a stage aside. "No one but a fool is always right" isn't a folksy reminder to stay humble; it's a trapdoor under the modern fantasy of being permanently correct. The insult is carefully aimed: not at ignorance, but at the performance of infallibility. The fool here is the person who mistakes consistency for truth and treats changing your mind as a reputational loss rather than an ethical necessity.

As a playwright, Hare writes for rooms where power speaks in confident declaratives: ministers, editors, lovers mid-fight, professionals certain their worldview is just "how things are". The sentence is engineered for dialogue because it turns a moral critique into social pressure. It suggests that relentless rightness isn't a sign of rigor; it's a symptom of vanity, fear, or bad faith. The subtext is political as much as personal: ideologues and careerists survive by never admitting error, even when evidence shifts. Hare's jab implies that such rigidity isn't strength, it's a kind of childishness dressed up as principle.

There's also craft in the absolutes. "No one but" and "always" create a closed circuit: if you claim permanent correctness, you self-identify as the fool. Hare doesn't argue you down; he makes your posture look ridiculous. In a culture that rewards hot takes and punishes nuance, the line doubles as a quiet defense of revision, doubt, and the grown-up art of being wrong.