Wit & Attitude Quote by Thomas Shadwell

Speed is easy to counterfeit; competence isn’t. Shadwell’s line lands because it flips our usual math: haste looks like acceleration, but in the hands of a fool it becomes the longest route possible. The joke is barbed, almost physical. You can hear the stage timing in it - the comic stampede, the confident blunder, the messy aftermath that takes ten times longer to clean up than it would have to do right once.

As a Restoration dramatist, Shadwell wrote in a culture newly obsessed with social performance: wit as currency, quickness as status, fashionable decisiveness as proof you belonged in the room. The subtext is a warning about that performance. A fool rushes not because the stakes demand it, but because attention does. Haste becomes a kind of vanity - movement standing in for judgment. The “slowest thing” is not literal velocity; it’s the bureaucratic drag of mistakes: the botched plan, the offended patron, the misread cue that forces everyone else to pause, reset, and accommodate the damage.

The intent is moral, but not pious. Shadwell isn’t praising patience in the abstract; he’s mocking the particular impatience that comes from thin understanding. The line also carries a quietly modern managerial truth: urgency without clarity creates rework, and rework is where time goes to die. In a society navigating commerce, courts, and reputations, a fool’s rush doesn’t just waste minutes - it burns social capital.