Daily Inspiration Quote by Don Marquis

Marquis lands the punch where democracy pretends it can’t bruise: the “public” isn’t a noble abstraction, it’s a crowd, and crowds dilute taste, attention, and accountability. The line works because it flips a sacred premise - that more participation is automatically better - into a problem of volume. “Too much of it” is deliberately rude; it treats the public like an unruly substance that has exceeded safe dosage. Then he twists the knife with managerial language: “less quantity and more quality.” That’s the rhetoric of editors, gatekeepers, and tastemakers, smuggled into a statement about civic life.

The intent is not a policy proposal so much as a provocation from a working journalist watching mass culture accelerate. Marquis wrote in the early 20th century, when newspapers were becoming true mass media, advertising was professionalizing persuasion, and “public opinion” was increasingly something you could manufacture, not just measure. In that context, “the public” starts to look less like a deliberative body and more like a market segment: huge, noisy, easily herded, and thrilled by spectacle.

Subtext: he’s defending standards, but also defending his own class of intermediaries. “Quality” quietly implies someone gets to decide what counts as quality - and that someone is unlikely to be the public itself. There’s a patrician sneer here, but it’s not empty snobbery; it’s anxiety about what happens when attention becomes the scarcest resource and the loudest voices set the terms. Marquis isn’t rejecting the public as an idea. He’s warning that scale can turn it into a stampede.