Life & Wisdom Quote by Mason Cooley

The line lands like a polite shrug with a knife behind it: the speaker grants the word "myth" to everyone else, then exempts himself with a simple, smug pivot. Cooley, a writer best known for aphorisms, understands that belief isn’t just a set of ideas; it’s a status claim. Calling something a myth is a way to demote it from truth to folklore, from authority to quaintness. The joke is that the sentence exposes its own hypocrisy in real time. It’s not argument, it’s optics.

The intent is diagnostic. Cooley isn’t defending a particular creed so much as spotlighting a common mental reflex: we treat our convictions as transparent reality and other people’s as stories they tell themselves. The subtext is a little uglier than simple bias. It’s a portrait of how modern sophistication can become its own dogma. The speaker sounds like a rational skeptic, the kind who prides himself on not being taken in, yet he’s performing the oldest trick in belief: imagining oneself immune to the very errors one detects in others.

Contextually, it fits a late-20th-century atmosphere where pluralism and secular critique made "myth" a fashionable label for religion, ideology, even national identity. Cooley compresses that cultural posture into one sentence and lets the self-certainty indict itself. The wit works because it doesn’t preach humility; it makes arrogance audible, and once you hear it, you can’t un-hear your own.