Wit & Attitude Quote by Oliver Herford

Tact, in Oliver Herford's hands, isn’t social grace; it’s a mutual nonaggression pact built on strategic dishonesty. The line riffs on the Golden Rule by swapping morality for manners: treat other people’s reputations the way you want yours treated, even if it requires a little falsification. That twist is the joke and the indictment. Herford compresses a whole drawing-room ethic into a single, barbed definition, making “tact” sound less like kindness than like a technique for keeping the peace while everyone quietly edits the truth.

The subtext is that polite society runs on agreed-upon omissions. You don’t say what you notice. You don’t repeat what you’ve heard. You don’t crystallize a flaw into a public fact. Not because you’re noble, but because you’d rather not be on the receiving end when someone else decides to be “honest.” Herford’s phrasing is surgical: “to lie about others” is blunt, almost vulgar, then it’s softened by the symmetry of “as you would have them lie about you,” which turns self-interest into a principle.

Context matters. Writing in a late-Victorian/early-20th-century milieu obsessed with propriety, Herford is poking at the era’s weaponized civility - the way etiquette can function as camouflage, and moral posturing can conceal a marketplace of gossip. His wit works because it doesn’t deny that tact is useful; it suggests that usefulness is inseparable from deception. Politeness becomes a kind of social fiction we co-author, not to elevate truth, but to keep life livable.