"So many objections may be made to everything, that nothing can overcome them but the necessity of doing something"
About this Quote
Johnson is skewering a timeless alibi: the belief that if you keep thinking, you can think your way out of acting. The line doesn’t celebrate action as virtuous; it treats action as unavoidable. “So many objections” is the key phrase - a blunt admission that reason, especially in the hands of the cautious or the vain, can generate infinite vetoes. You can always find a downside, a hypothetical, a moral snag, a logistical problem. The mind, left unattended, becomes a professional dissenter.
The sentence works because it stages a tug-of-war between two forces Johnson knew well: the Enlightenment’s love of argument and the brute pressure of lived reality. “Necessity” arrives like a gavel. It’s not inspiration or courage that breaks the paralysis, but constraint: bills due, duties owed, time running out, consequences accumulating. Johnson, a moralist with a comedian’s eye for self-deception, is implying that many “objections” aren’t principled at all. They’re camouflage for fear, laziness, or a preference for the comfortable status of the perpetual critic.
Context matters. Johnson wrote in a culture thick with pamphlets, salons, and public disputation, where conversation could masquerade as accomplishment. He also struggled personally with procrastination and melancholy; the remark reads like a hard-won self-diagnosis as much as a social critique. Its sharper subtext: rationality is an instrument, not a refuge. If you wait for the last objection to disappear, you’ll die waiting; necessity will make the decision for you, and you may not like its terms.
The sentence works because it stages a tug-of-war between two forces Johnson knew well: the Enlightenment’s love of argument and the brute pressure of lived reality. “Necessity” arrives like a gavel. It’s not inspiration or courage that breaks the paralysis, but constraint: bills due, duties owed, time running out, consequences accumulating. Johnson, a moralist with a comedian’s eye for self-deception, is implying that many “objections” aren’t principled at all. They’re camouflage for fear, laziness, or a preference for the comfortable status of the perpetual critic.
Context matters. Johnson wrote in a culture thick with pamphlets, salons, and public disputation, where conversation could masquerade as accomplishment. He also struggled personally with procrastination and melancholy; the remark reads like a hard-won self-diagnosis as much as a social critique. Its sharper subtext: rationality is an instrument, not a refuge. If you wait for the last objection to disappear, you’ll die waiting; necessity will make the decision for you, and you may not like its terms.
Quote Details
| Topic | Decision-Making |
|---|
More Quotes by Samuel
Add to List
