Success Quote by Arnold H. Glasow

A businessman’s joke with a scalpel hidden inside: “The fewer the facts, the stronger the opinion” skewers not ignorance itself, but the swagger that ignorance can purchase. Glasow isn’t praising simplicity; he’s diagnosing a weird psychological arbitrage. Facts cost time, attention, and humility. They force revisions. When you don’t pay that price, you get to keep the clean, unbothered certainty of a position that has never had to survive contact with reality.

The line works because it flips a cultural assumption. We like to believe confidence is earned by knowledge, but in practice confidence often thrives in the vacuum where knowledge would complicate the story. A well-informed opinion is usually messier: it arrives with caveats, competing variables, and the uncomfortable awareness of what you don’t know. An under-informed opinion can be pure theater - strong not because it’s right, but because it’s unchallenged internally.

Glasow’s context matters. Mid-20th-century business culture prized decisiveness: make the call, move the product, project certainty. That environment produces a special temptation to treat “strong opinion” as a leadership trait rather than a rhetorical effect. His aphorism reads like an office-side warning against mistaking volume for validity.

The subtext lands even harder now, in an attention economy that rewards hot takes over slow verification. Facts don’t just weaken bad opinions; they weaken marketable ones, because they add friction. Glasow’s punchline is a reminder that certainty is often a sign not of clarity, but of missing data.