"Several excuses are always less convincing than one"
About this Quote
Pile on enough excuses and you don’t look innocent, you look busy. Huxley’s line has the clean snap of a courtroom cross-examination: the moment you start stacking reasons, the listener stops weighing your circumstances and starts counting your evasions. One excuse can read as misfortune; several read as strategy.
The specific intent is almost managerial in its coldness. Huxley is diagnosing persuasion, not morality. People don’t reject multiple excuses because each is logically flawed; they reject them because the accumulation advertises improvisation. A single explanation implies a coherent story with a clear cause. A string of them implies you’re shopping for whichever version lands. Even truthful details, delivered in bulk, start to feel like a con artist’s patter: too many handles, too many exits.
The subtext is a critique of modern self-justification, the way rhetoric becomes a substitute for responsibility. Huxley, writing in an era that watched institutions perfect their public relations, understood how narrative can be manufactured on demand. Excuses are rarely meant to inform; they’re meant to manage perception. Multiply them and you reveal the management.
Context matters: this is the novelist of brave new worlds, a man attuned to how language anesthetizes. The aphorism works because it’s less a rule about truth than a rule about trust. Trust prefers simplicity, not because life is simple, but because sincerity usually is.
The specific intent is almost managerial in its coldness. Huxley is diagnosing persuasion, not morality. People don’t reject multiple excuses because each is logically flawed; they reject them because the accumulation advertises improvisation. A single explanation implies a coherent story with a clear cause. A string of them implies you’re shopping for whichever version lands. Even truthful details, delivered in bulk, start to feel like a con artist’s patter: too many handles, too many exits.
The subtext is a critique of modern self-justification, the way rhetoric becomes a substitute for responsibility. Huxley, writing in an era that watched institutions perfect their public relations, understood how narrative can be manufactured on demand. Excuses are rarely meant to inform; they’re meant to manage perception. Multiply them and you reveal the management.
Context matters: this is the novelist of brave new worlds, a man attuned to how language anesthetizes. The aphorism works because it’s less a rule about truth than a rule about trust. Trust prefers simplicity, not because life is simple, but because sincerity usually is.
Quote Details
| Topic | Honesty & Integrity |
|---|
More Quotes by Aldous
Add to List
