Love Quote by Dalton Trumbo

Trumbo’s move here is to yank “truth” away from the people who usually claim it: experts, bureaucrats, romantics, ideologues. He opens with the blunt, almost prosecutorial “Now the truth of the matter is,” then immediately undercuts the authority that phrase pretends to carry. The list that follows is a deliberately mismatched trio - Einstein, taxes, love - a comic braid of high science, civic coercion, and private chaos. The joke lands because it refuses hierarchy. If you can’t confidently explain relativity, you also can’t fully explain the IRS, and the fact that you’ve been flattened by love doesn’t make you special. Confusion is the common condition.

The subtext is less “ignorance is okay” than “stop using understanding as a prerequisite for acknowledging reality.” Trumbo is arguing against a certain kind of intellectual gatekeeping: the idea that if you can’t parse the theory, you’re disqualified from living in its consequences. Taxes will still be due. Love will still wreck your sleep schedule. The universe will still run on laws you didn’t vote on.

In context, it reads like a survival philosophy from a writer who lived through political hysteria and institutional punishment. Trumbo, blacklisted in Hollywood, knew how easily “truth” becomes a weapon, how quickly official explanations harden into moral tests. So he offers a sturdier proposition: existence doesn’t wait for your comprehension. “They exist. They happen” is the line’s real muscle - a terse, almost fatalistic insistence on facts over narratives, experience over permission.