Wit & Attitude Quote by Jerome Lawrence

Certainty is the punchline here, and Jerome Lawrence delivers it with a playwright’s instinct for timing. “The man who has everything figured out is probably a fool” isn’t a gentle reminder to stay humble; it’s a trapdoor under the kind of swagger that mistakes mental closure for intelligence. The phrasing matters: “everything” is cartoonishly total, the sort of word people use when they’re selling you a worldview, a politics, a self-help program, or their own infallibility. Lawrence doesn’t argue against knowledge. He skewers the performance of omniscience.

As a playwright, Lawrence worked in a medium where human beings are rarely consistent, motives collide, and the “truth” changes depending on who’s speaking and what they need. In that world, anyone claiming to have life neatly solved isn’t admirable; they’re dramatically suspect. The line reads like a stage direction aimed at an audience: watch out for the character who never doubts. He’s either lying, deluded, or dangerous.

The subtext is also cultural. Mid-century American theater (Lawrence co-wrote Inherit the Wind) often defended inquiry against dogma, especially in climates where public certainty was rewarded and skepticism was treated as disloyalty. This quote takes aim at the same temptation: the comfort of final answers. Wisdom, Lawrence suggests, looks less like a closed case and more like an ongoing rehearsal - alert, revisable, alive to complexity. The “fool” isn’t the person who doesn’t know. It’s the one who refuses to keep learning.