Life & Wisdom Quote by Samuel McChord Crothers

Facts are supposed to be the antidote to confusion, yet Crothers flips them into the source of it. "The trouble with facts is that there are so many of them" lands because it punctures the era's growing faith in accumulation: more data, more reports, more statistics, more clippings, more certainty. Instead, he points to a quieter crisis of modernity: information abundance doesn’t automatically produce judgment. It produces clutter, and clutter is easy to mistake for truth.

Crothers, a wry early-20th-century essayist with a minister’s ear for human self-deception, is targeting the kind of mind that hides behind "just the facts" as if selection, emphasis, and interpretation weren’t already arguments. The line is funny because it sounds like a complaint a lazy person would make, but the joke doubles as a critique of intellectual complacency. The problem isn’t that facts exist; it’s that they arrive without hierarchy. They don’t tell you what matters. They don’t organize themselves into meaning. They invite cherry-picking, the oldest trick in the book, now dressed up as objectivity.

Contextually, it’s a prescient jab at the professionalization of knowledge in his time: newspapers thickening with detail, social science emerging, bureaucracies expanding, a culture learning to fetishize evidence while quietly outsourcing interpretation to whoever tells the most persuasive story. The subtext is almost a warning: when the pile gets high enough, "facts" stop functioning as anchors and start functioning as weapons. Whoever can curate the pile controls the conclusion.