Life & Wisdom Quote by Marilyn French

Luck makes the introductions; judgment decides what to do with them. Marilyn French’s line has the cool snap of someone who watched capable people get kneecapped by circumstance, and mediocre ones float upward on tailwinds they didn’t earn. “Not many men” reads, on first pass, like a plain statistical shrug. In French’s hands, it’s also a gendered audit: the group most culturally presumed to be rational and in control is, in fact, rarely equipped with the two things that power is supposed to certify.

The phrase “good fortune and good sense” pairs two currencies we like to keep morally separate. Fortune is external, random, socially distributed. Sense is internal, earned, a trait we flatter ourselves into believing we can cultivate. French collapses that comforting division. She implies that the world doesn’t reliably reward sense, and fortune doesn’t reliably produce it. That tension is the subtext: a quiet rebuke of meritocracy’s bedtime story, where the successful are wise by definition and the wise are destined to succeed.

Context matters. French wrote in the long shadow of second-wave feminism, when “men” wasn’t merely demographic; it was shorthand for who got to author the rules of work, marriage, sex, and public life. The line lands as both observation and indictment: when men have fortune without sense, institutions suffer; when they have sense without fortune, their influence is limited; when they have both, they’re scarce and therefore dangerously overvalued.

It’s aphoristic, but not neutral. French isn’t praising the rare enlightened man so much as warning how much damage is done while we wait for him to appear.