Daily Inspiration Quote by George Jessel

A joke this tidy only works because it flatters and insults you in the same breath. Jessel starts with a piety everyone wants to believe: the brain is “a wonderful organ.” Then he slips in the switchblade. The brain “doesn’t stop until you get up to deliver a speech” recasts public speaking as a kind of temporary brain death: the moment the stakes rise, the mind goes offline and the mouth takes over. It’s not really anti-intellectual; it’s anti-performance. He’s mocking the gap between thinking and speaking, between private competence and public display.

The subtext is a dig at status rituals. Speeches are supposed to signal authority, clarity, leadership. Jessel implies they often do the opposite, revealing vanity, nerves, or empty rhetoric. The line also protects the speaker with preemptive self-deprecation: if you’re about to address a room, you can borrow this and lower expectations while looking witty. It’s humor as social armor.

Context matters: Jessel was a 19th-century British judge, steeped in courts where language is power and “speech” can mean both persuasion and procedure. In that world, eloquence is currency, and verbosity is a known vice. The quip reads like a bench-side warning: don’t confuse talking with thinking, and don’t assume the podium improves intelligence. The punchline lands because it punctures a timeless civic fiction - that the act of addressing others makes you wiser. Often, it just makes you louder.