Wit & Attitude Quote by John Jay Chapman

Chapman’s complaint isn’t that people are lazy; it’s that they’re trained. “Slow progress” gets pinned to a “single fact” with the blunt confidence of a moralist, then the line tightens into something darker: “Every man is born under the yoke.” The word choice matters. A yoke isn’t just hardship, it’s harnessed usefulness - a system that turns human life into directed labor, obedience, and habit. Chapman is less interested in tyrants than in the quiet machinery that makes tyranny feel normal.

The second clause does the real work: we don’t merely suffer “the oppressions of his age,” we “grow up beneath” them. Oppression becomes atmosphere, a ceiling that shapes posture. The subtext is an accusation aimed at society’s most polite institutions - schools, churches, workplaces, newspapers - the places that teach you what is “realistic,” what is “radical,” what is “improper.” Progress is slow because each generation is apprenticed into its era’s common sense before it ever has language for dissent.

Context sharpens the edge. Chapman lived through American industrial consolidation, aggressive class stratification, the afterlife of Reconstruction, and a moral culture that often confused respectability with virtue. In that world, “oppression” didn’t always arrive as a boot; it arrived as a timetable, a wage, a doctrine, a “grown-up” warning not to make trouble. The line’s bleak elegance is strategic: by universalizing the condition (“every man”), Chapman refuses comforting exceptions. If liberation is possible, it won’t come from optimism. It will come from unlearning.