Life & Wisdom Quote by Bernard De Voto

Calling pessimism "wisdom" with better branding is a neat cultural power move, and De Voto knows it. The line flips the usual insult: instead of treating pessimism as a personality flaw, he frames it as a hard-won clarity that fragile people can only interpret as gloom. "Weak nerves" is doing most of the work here. It suggests that what’s really being judged isn’t the accuracy of a grim assessment, but the listener’s tolerance for discomfort. If you can’t handle bad news, you’ll pathologize the messenger.

The intent is corrective and a little combative: De Voto is defending the dour realist against a society that rewards cheerfulness as etiquette. There’s also a subtle jab at optimism as a kind of social performance, a way of smoothing over risk, conflict, or decline. Wisdom, in his formulation, isn’t the sunny ability to "stay positive"; it’s the capacity to look directly at consequences without flinching. The insult lands because it implies that calling someone a pessimist is often a self-revealing confession: I need reality softened.

Context matters. De Voto wrote as a public intellectual in a mid-century America full of boosterism, institutional confidence, and salesmanship posing as philosophy. In that atmosphere, skepticism could be read as disloyalty, defeatism, or bad vibes. His sentence anticipates a recurring American argument: are you warning us because you see something, or because you’re broken? De Voto’s answer is blunt: the broken ones are the people who require optimism to function.