"The microbe is so very small: You cannot take him out at all"
About this Quote
Belloc’s “microbe” is a nursery-rhyme menace: tiny, jaunty, and unstoppable. The line works because it marries a childlike sing-song cadence to a genuinely modern anxiety. By Belloc’s lifetime, germ theory had migrated from lab benches into public life - hygiene campaigns, municipal sanitation, the new moral pressure to be “clean.” He turns that scientific revolution into a pocket-sized bogeyman whose chief power is not malice but invisibility. “So very small” isn’t just description; it’s the punchline’s setup. The threat is precisely that you can’t get a grip on it, literally or psychologically.
“You cannot take him out at all” is doing extra work. The phrasing sounds like removing a toy from a box, or escorting someone out of a room. That domestication is the joke: we keep reaching for old social tools (shooing, scolding, banishing) to manage a problem that doesn’t operate on human terms. Belloc even genders the microbe as “him,” a sly bit of anthropomorphism that makes the unseen feel personal - and therefore blameable. The subtext: modern danger doesn’t announce itself with villains and banners; it hides in ordinary contact, in the everyday.
Belloc, a Catholic-tinged satirist of bourgeois certainty, also smuggles in a jab at human control. The line’s absolute “at all” punctures the era’s faith in progress: you can build sewers, scrub hands, pass laws - and still the smallest actor on the stage refuses eviction. The wit is light, but the worldview is unsparing.
“You cannot take him out at all” is doing extra work. The phrasing sounds like removing a toy from a box, or escorting someone out of a room. That domestication is the joke: we keep reaching for old social tools (shooing, scolding, banishing) to manage a problem that doesn’t operate on human terms. Belloc even genders the microbe as “him,” a sly bit of anthropomorphism that makes the unseen feel personal - and therefore blameable. The subtext: modern danger doesn’t announce itself with villains and banners; it hides in ordinary contact, in the everyday.
Belloc, a Catholic-tinged satirist of bourgeois certainty, also smuggles in a jab at human control. The line’s absolute “at all” punctures the era’s faith in progress: you can build sewers, scrub hands, pass laws - and still the smallest actor on the stage refuses eviction. The wit is light, but the worldview is unsparing.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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